Whither OpenOffice?

Now that Oracle has (after the introduction of LibreOffice and The Document Foundation) decided to make OpenOffice a community-based project, what will happen in the world free StarOffice derivatives? I can see three possibilities:

1. OpenOffice successfully transfers to The Document Foundation and LibreOffice is merged back into OpenOffice under the OpenOffice name. I strongly suspect that The Document Foundation would undergo major changes in that case.


2. OpenOffice becomes its own successful project. In that case, LibreOffice and The Document Foundation die on the vine. Not only would the advantage of the OpenOffice name be nearly insurmountable, the LibreOffice community is mired in excessive open source zeal and geek elitism (the bitter opposition by a large segment of said community to the introduction of web forums--because "mailing lists are better"--is only one example of that). Reading the LibreOffice lists, one would never guess that the overwhelming majority of OpenOffice downloads are for Windows. Linux comes in third behind Mac OS X and far, far, far behind Windows. And if you think that's just because Linux users have all gone to LibreOffice, think again (web snapshot for June of last year, pre-LibreOffice).


3. Oracle manages to hamstring community-driven OpenOffice somehow. In that case LibreOffice either gets its act together, or it doesn't. If it does, it could supplant OpenOffice. Otherwise, free Star Office-derivatives will languish.

Options 1 and 2 seem the most likely. A fourth possibility is that The Document Foundation receives the OpenOffice brand and decides to kill it. That is too stupid to consider.

Update: A commenter made a good point below about the reliability of the usage statistic:

Your figure for how many people use OpenOffice is bogus. Linux users get their copy of OpenOffice bundled in their distro; they don't need to download it. So unless you throw in all the copies distributed via Linux distros, your figures mean nothing.

Okay, so the ~90% OpenOffice.org for Windows download figure doesn't reflect the overall share of Windows OpenOffice.org. It does still show that there are a huge number of OpenOffice.org Windows users even if we can't be sure how much of the OpenOffice.org install base they represent.