My understanding was LibreOffice, a better maintained project, forked to further distance itself from Oracle. When Apache accepted the OpenOffice project Oracle assigned all trademarks, etc. Are you referring to something else?
edit: See the second and third subsections under this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice#History. LibreOffice was the fork motivated by dissatisfaction with Oracle. OpenOffice code was donated, along with trademarks, etc. to the ASF.
Actually, it's more complicated than that. It's not entirely Oracle's fault - Sun made third party developers' lives very painful and wouldn't accept patches without an enormous amount of red tape. They essentially caused the split when Michael Meeks was forced to create the Go-OO fork where he produced a build that merged in a huge number of patches that were backlogged from the main tree.
When OpenOffice pushed back (and after they completely shafted Kohei's effort in contributing a solver for Calc) they in essence told the wider development community that their contributions weren't welcome and forced the creation of The Document Foundation to govern the development of LibreOffice. The TDF then worked out how to be welcoming, lowered barriers to entry for new contributors massively, put in infrastructure like gerrit and opengrok, majorly simplified the build process and generally showed a lot of love to their developers. At this point it was game over for Apache OpenOffice, and now everyone contributes their code to LibreOffice. Which is an utter no-brainer really - why send your code to a bunch of people who arrogantly think your efforts are by default crap as you have no experience with the codebase?
Thanks for the added detail - but I didn't mean to assign blame to Oracle or oversimplify it. I'm just saying AOO isn't a fork motivated by Oracle copyrights as stated in the posts I was replying to. LibreOffice would more correctly be called the fork, and copyright really wasn't the motivation.
All good :-) LO is definitely a fork, and licensing was indeed a big issue, there is just quite a bit of history that led up to the fork, which happened before Oracle donated their code and trademark to the Apache Foundation.
It's frankly all kind of old news for most LO devs. We're far more interested in improving LO and competing against our real rival, which is Microsoft. Every now and then someone might make a small comment about AOO, but we don't encourage a lot of criticism of AOO because we have enough to do than spend any effort on ill-will towards Apache. We want to drive positive change and win by being awesome, not "win" through negativity :-)
Being that you're a LO contributor, then - thank you for your work! I use LibreOffice all the time and it's replaced Microsoft at the home of virtually every friend and relative who comes to me for tech support. I'm yet to hear of any problems using it from any of them.
