Funny to see that Microsoft software is called 'closed', and they are always accused of overly protecting their markets. This is from one of the OO developers:
But I’d love to be proven wrong. I’d love to be proven that Sun still are willing to work with us, to make OO.o truly a wonderful product as well as a project attractive to prospective code contributors. But there is nothing I, as a single insignificant mere mortal can do to influence the behemoth that is Sun. It’s impossible to make an even slightest change in how the project is run, even after countless hours of coding and more than 10,000 lines of code generation (which I received no compensation for and involved quite a lot of personal sacrifice). In the end, I made no difference at all. Sad, truly sad.
This is a bit of a no-brainer. How open is your open source software if there is a large company investing highly in it? They need to meet customer demand just like any other, so probably that piece of open software is less open than you want it to be. If key positions are taken you can have a strong grip on the project and hence your company's future.
Personally I like the recent steps taken by Microsoft. They totally openend up their old and their new document format, and now they released the source of the .NET Framework. The software works and integrates extremely well. The value proposition of Microsoft Office together with SharePoint 2007 (for the most part free) for the team and collaboration stuff to me is very appealing. I wouldn't trade that for the eighties look of OpenOffice today.
[edit]A Tweakers thread actually had a sensible comment on this. I roughly translated:
If OO will fork the code you will have eight or nine versions in no time at all, who with a little luck will be 95% compatible with each other. Only a different 95% in each case of course. And then of course just when you want to send out your company folder the part that indicates how great your company actually just might not be to visible to customers using My-OO instead of the Your-OO.
Als OO dadelijk een paar keer gaat 'forken' heb je binnen de kortst mogelijke keren 8 of 9 verschillende versies die met een beetje geluk 95% compatible met elkaar zijn. Maar natuurlijk wel allemaal een andere 95%. En natuurlijk is het dan zo dat alle leuke dingen die jij in je bedrijfs reclame folder hebt staan die laten zien hoe goed jouw bedrijf is net niet helemaal overkomen bij jouw klanten die een toevallig andere versie hebebn.
(isn't this already the case?)