However you are right OpenOffice does deserve another close look as does LibreOffice. I wish there were alternatives with less baggage.

I'm not sure why you would think that. OpenOffice is progressing nicely in it's new home at the ASF. And calling it "IBM sponsored" might be a bit of a misnomer: IBM has contributed a lot of code and has paid developers serving as committers, yes. But one of the very points of the ASF incubation process is to ensure a sufficiently diverse community around a project, to where no one company has control of the project.

There's a lot of great work going on in the AOO project, and I heartily recommend that anyone looking for an office suite give it a look. It is definitely not the case that "LibreOffice won and OpenOffice is dead". We have two projects now, with a lot in common, but evolving in slightly different directions and - to some extent - competing with each other. Personally, I think this is good for the ecosystem as a whole and that both projects are becoming better as a result.

It's mostly a good thing when large companies like IBM contribute to open source software. However you are exactly right when you mention the importance of having a diverse community. You can't depend on any single companies interests being aligned with all the users and developers on an important open source project. This is my big worry with MySQL today.

Almost everyone should want their to be a good alternative to Excel which seems to get worse with each version. I plan to give both OpenOffice and LibreOffice a try over the next few weeks. Eventually I want to be 100% Linux but Excel and to a lesser extent Word and Powerpoint is still keeping me on OSX (BTW - Excel on OSX is really crappy). I hope you are right that two competing projects are better than a single effort.

Disclaimer: I am technically an AOO committer, but I'm not particularly active in the project right now. That said, I monitor the mailing lists from time to time, and from what I can see, a lot of the Symphony code has been merged back into AOO, but not all of it. And there's no question that IBM is a substantial part of the AOO community. In fact, that is probably one of the reasons it took so long for AOO to graduate the incubator... there was concern that the project was too "IBM heavy".

But, for better or worse, things seem to be moving forward and, personally, I'm excited for the future of the project. The one thing that disappoints me, however, is the perception that there's still some sense of conflict between AOO and LO and that the two projects don't collaborate as much as they could. I'm hoping that - over time - any sort of adversarial air will die off and the two projects will be "friendly competitors" but time will tell. shrug