Congratulations to the (formerly) OpenOffice.org leadership on the launch of their new foundation. I think it's probably an important organizational transformation and I hope it's not too late to also transform the product.
A little more than 7 years ago, Mozilla built itself a life raft called the Mozilla Foundation. The original corporate contributor Netscape (then a small part of AOL-TimeWarner) had abandoned the project and the product. This new organization, the Mozilla Foundation, was established not just to keep the project going, turning the crank on yet more Mozilla releases, but to revolutionize the product. We transformed the legacy Netscape Communicator-alike Mozilla Suite into Firefox and Thunderbird and delivered those great apps to hundreds of millions of users all over the world.
The organization was important. It put our destiny in our own hands. But that alone was no magic bullet. It was the software we produced, Firefox and Thunderbird, that made us sustainable. So I hope that we'll see dramatic improvements to LibreOffice (the new name for the OpenOffice.org product) over the next year or two. Without that, I suspect that the Web-based productivity suites will have gained too much ground for LibreOffice to be anything but a legacy application.
