After Oracle acquired SUN Microsystem, some leading members of the OpenOffice.org community forked OpenOffice.org as LibreOffice. They also set up The Document Foundation ^[1] to continue the independent works of the OpenOffice.org community.

However, Oracle is not taking their move well. They want the founders of The Documents Foundation to leave the OpenOffice.org council. According to Oracle, their works with The Documents Foundation and LibreOffice ^[2] will conflict with that of OpenOffice.org.

In many FOSS projects there is usually a free exchange of codes and ideas between the original project and the forked one. There is however little or no competition between them. The fact that Oracle mentions conflict of interest suggests that they see LibreOffice as a competitor and that they want tighter control over the direction that OpenOffice.org takes.

LibreOffice already has backing from a lot of companies including Google, Red Hat, Canonical and Novell. Moreover Mark Shuttleworth has also said that future releases of Ubuntu will ship with LibreOffice, not OpenOffice.org.

So, for now LibreOffice seems to be winning; although the developers will in all likelihood get kicked out from a project they have been working on for years.

[source ^[3]]