Over the years I've seen lots of companies trying to combine the open source development model with a for profit (and publicly funded) business plan. While this seemed okayish at the time, this whole Oracle debacle is clear proof that the opensource development model combined with some corporate entity controlling it is risky from an opensource perspective. Big opensource projects hopefully have learned from this and go the Debian route : turn yourself in a NGO or something and never worry about shareprice or corporate takeovers again.

It is a real shame that big projects like MySQL and OpenOffice are in this position. Maybe it was more or less opensource, it sure as hell was not independant. Sure forking works, but recreating the entire organisation (and funding) will keep you from developing quite some time.

Microsoft need no worry on the short term, because most departments will most likely resort to the Sun ODF plugin for MS Office. But a lot of cities and smaller goverment bodies are switching or have switched to OpenOffice.org. As for as their ooxml format: the new policy specifically names ODF as the standard for office documents. So it doesn't matter al that much if ooxml is approved as an ISO standard or not. I'm just curious how many countries need to adopt policies like this before Microsoft takes it loss and starts supporting ODF natively.

Fixing the faulty ISO process should be next on the list for the Dutch government ;)