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It seems pretty cool that OpenOffice will now gain developers from Apache and from IBM. Now ... if libreoffice really wants to merge the codebase, they could just relicense their stuff under a dual LGPL3 and/or Apache license, so the best of both projects can still be merged or at least so that both projects will remain compatible at a source level for a while. After all, it was libreoffice who forked so it should be them who merge back.

The Apache 2.0 license is a liberal non-copyleft license. AFAIK this means that both open source code and closed source code can be contributed to an Apache 2.0 license project.

LibreOffice is licensed under LGPL v3. This copyleft license means that no closed-source components can be accepted.

So from now, open source code contributed to ASF OpenOffice can be adopted (and re-licensed as LGPL v3) by LibreOffice, and LGPL v3 code contibuted to LibreOffice can be incorporated into ASF OpenOffice (but it must remain LGPL v3, and copyright attribution must remain with the original authors).

I don't think the corporates (Oracle and IBM) want the latter to occur. I think they want the ability to make all or prat of ASF OpenOffice closed source. I'm pretty sure they don't want any LGPL v3 copyleft code where the copyrights belong to individuals.

Therefore, IMO, no re-merge is likely to be accepted by the ASF OpenOffice crowd.

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