Oracle proposes donating OpenOffice.org to Apache Software Foundation

My expectation is that Oracle doesn't care about any of this. OO.o isn't why they bought Sun, it's not something they care about, and it has been just generating bad press for them. They'd probably prefer to just never talk about it again. IBM, however, wants to be able to make a proprietary version, can't start from the LGPL base, but would like to stay in sync as much as possible with it. Oracle doesn't want to piss IBM off more than necessary, particularly since they're competitors and Oracle gets a lot of anti-trust attention. I think IBM wants the ASF version to be something that LO will merge regularly and to which people will contribute the work they'd like in all office software, and Symphony and LO can diverge less fundamentally.

FWIW, RMS's canonical example of a piece of software which should be under a non-copyleft license is libpng, because it implements a free standard which competes with a proprietary format. Surely, therefore, there should be an implementation of the semantics of ODF under a permissive license, and it should be used by all open-source software that uses ODF as well as any proprietary software vendors who are not trying to damage the format. So it would make sense to end up with OO.o under a permissive license having the standard ODF semantics engine and an unmaintained UI; Symphony replacing the UI with a proprietary one; and LO replacing the UI with an LGPL one.