Ars Technica is reporitng that the OpenOffice.org community conflict leads to Frangmentation. I have included a compressed version of the article below. Please link to the original article to get the entire story.   

…Developer Kohei Yoshida expresses his frustration with Sun’s excessively bureaucratic specification process and unwillingness to compromise and communicate with members of the community. Although Yoshida is making his code available under the suitably permissive LGPL license, Sun is now attempting to reimplement it from scratch because Yoshida refuses to assign the copyright to Sun, and the company is reluctant to permit inclusion of code that it does not own itself.

Novell OpenOffice.org developer Michael Meeks has condemned Sun for refusing to be a team player. “Ultimately, it seems to me the current setup is not a winning, open approach, but a dangerous situation that hobbles OpenOffice.org, and leaves us in a bind,” says Meeks. “Regrettably though, it appears that some of these [improvements] can never go up-stream, as Sun refuses to accept them. Thus, it seems the best approach is to continue working where we can with Sun on OO.o, (helping them eat by improving their core)—while simultaneously providing our rejected features directly to users somehow,” Meeks suggests.

Although this isn’t a full fork, it’s still serious fragmentation, and it’s definitely not a good thing for the OpenOffice.org community. Sun’s obstinate and heavy-handed way of interacting with OpenOffice.org community contributors is leading to fragmentation.

In another article in Ars Technica entitled,”OpenOffice goes Premium,” it brings out the following information… 

Now, a group of OpenOffice enthusiasts have released OpenOffice Premium, a new bundle that includes the OpenOffice suite and a grab-bag of extras, such as clip art, document templates, and fonts. The idea is to provide a package that is similar to a new installation of commercial office suites such as Microsoft Office and Corel Perfect Office, both of which come with a plethora of clip art and other goodies.

The choice of the word “Premium” for this bundle is somewhat misleading, as the package is available as a free download. Like many SourceForge web pages, the download page is more confusing than it could be, but I quickly found an international version of the bundle that came in at 243 MB. The full install is 441 MB, which is about twice the size of my install of Microsoft Office XP. This rough doubling of system requirements carries over to RAM usage as well: with the same document open, OpenOffice Writer used up 50 MB of memory, compared to 22 for Word.

For the full story see the article on Ars Technica… OpenOffice goes Premium

Links to OpenOffice.org Developers Blogs…