A coalition of programmers behind OpenOffice.org formed a foundation to manage a community-driven branch of the open-source productivity software. OpenOffice is owned by Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL), and the group aims to free it from the company's control, writes Ryan Paul at Ars Technica.

The foundation, named Document Foundation, is developing an OpenOffice spin-off called LibreOffice, which is already available in beta. A number of corporations, including Novell, Red Had and Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), have endorsed the plan.

OpenOffice.org, was originally based on Sun Microsystem's StarOffice, but has gained development contributions from IBM (NYSE: IBM), Novell and other companies. There have been discussions for some time about creating a more robust environment for the code by setting up an independent foundation to manage it, and Oracle's recent purchase of Sun generated more support for that idea, Paul writes.

"There was obviously already some support for the idea of forking the OOo code base before Oracle acquired Sun, but the acquisition substantially increased the need for community-driven governance and helped to build swift consensus among independent stakeholders," Paul writes. "There are a lot of unanswered questions about Oracle's plans for OOo and there are well-founded concerns about the extent of Oracle's commitment to openness."

Not everyone is optimistic about the spin-off's prospects, though. Liberating OpenOffice from Oracle is not enough to give the software fresh relevance, writes Matt Asay in a post at GigaOm. "Nothing on the Foundation's new website, or in any of its press materials, suggests that the Foundation's purpose is to do anything more than free OpenOffice development from the control of one company, Oracle," he writes. "Screenshots look an awful lot like the OpenOffice suite that LibreOffice claims to leave behind."

Today's productivity tools should be integrated with the web and Google Apps is lighting the way, Asay argues.

"It's unclear what a web-light, client-heavy Microsoft Office clone can hope to achieve in terms of real innovation," he writes. "We just work differently now. We email. We SMS. We Facebook. We IM. Or perhaps we crop photos in iPhoto (s aapl) or make movies in iMovie. What we don't do, or rarely do, is open a Word document to create a stale relic of communication. Business moves too fast these days to open attachments."

For more:
- see Ryan Paul's post at Ars Technica
- see Matt Asay's post at GigaOm

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