For those interested in such matters, I’m proposing this little genealogical chart of the family. Any comments, corrections, etc will be gratefully acknowledged!

Indeed, the ASF has achieved two amazing success stories – it produces the world’s most popular webserver, despite competition from commercial giants likes Microsoft; and it has succeeded in straddling the gulf between the open source communities and commercial software houses without upsetting either camp. For this reason, the announcement yesterday by Oracle (with a little help from IBM) that it was putting forward OpenOffice.org for adoption by the ASF is a fascinating development.

History lesson: Oracle acquired the OpenOffice.org software as part of its acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Within a few months, the volunteer community (which had been such a feature of OpenOffice.org) upped sticks and announced the formation of The Document Foundation as a home for the continuing OpenOffice.org project – which they had to rebrand as LibreOffice as Oracle had hung on to the OpenOffice.org trademark. TDF has succeeded in establishing credibility, releasing new versions of LibreOffice, and raising substantial funds in an appeal to supporters.

So, this latest move by Oracle could be seen as a move to wrong foot the volunteers in TDF. Alternatively, it could be seen an eminently sensible step for them to take. If OpenOffice.org passes the ASF adoption process, then there will be no question about whether it is a ‘genuine open source project’. You can’t get much more open source street cred than ASF branding. Oracle and IBM can continue to release commercial derivatives of OOo for their customers (as they do with the Apache Web Server), and might even persuade Red Flag to join the party. And the ASF can make the leap from the world’s server rooms to the world’s desktops.

But what about the folks at The Document Foundation? they have invested huge amounts of time and energy in establishing their new baby. It would not be easy to get back into bed with Oracle and IBM, as their initial response suggests. But maybe it’s time to set aside history, set aside the personality issues on all sides, take a deep breath, and decide which route is most likely to create great software that can continue to challenge Microsoft on the desktops of the world.

Well, there’s nothing like asking people to put their hands in their wallets to find out what level of support you have. That’s what The Document Foundation guys did. They needed 50,000 Euro to set themselves up as a legal entity under German law. Not a trivial sum! So they set up a web site and asked people to contribute 50,000 Euro in four weeks.

And contribute they have. I was amazed to see they’ve reached their target in just eight days. That is pretty amazing – I guess The Document Foundation is now full of people pinching themselves in disbelief.

Well done folks.

Has the transition been successful? I’m about to download the software and try it out – why not do the same?

OpenOffice.org – the previous incarnation of LibreOffice – was proud of its adoption rate in Brazil (where – confusingly – for trademark reasons it was known as BrOffice). Unusually, take-up was particularly strong from commercial organisations, for example with tens of thousands of users reported in both Banco do Brasil and Petrobras.

So today’s news is a vote of confidence in the new Foundation, and shows that the transition from the corporate run OpenOffice.org to the community managed Document Foundation is still continuing. We can expect keen interest in the forthcoming release of LibreOffice 3.3, particularly as Oracle has decided to go it alone and continue development of OpenOffice.org under the Oracle badge.