I so did not see that coming... (sarcasm)

OK so Novell has made it known they wish to fork Open Office (see article )with one version supporting Microsoft's proposed option to the ODF. Now this wasn't that far fetched, but I wonder how licensing for the fork will work out. With the existing code base being GPL'ed and there likely being snippets of proprietary code in the fork, just how is that going to be kosher?

Novell's moves are bold, but I think at the same time they aren't totally taking into account the zealot culture that's formed around Linux and FOSS. I'm more a moderate than anything when it comes to my support of open source, so while I get where Novell is going I think a lot of it is leaving a bad taste in the mouths of many of the developer community.

We'll have to wait and see how the forking of Open Office affects the potential cohesiveness of the project and its ability to really go head to head if at all with MS Office in the future.

UPDATE: OK so a few folks viewed my view of the situation as FUD. According to posts, the OpenOffice code will not fork but the plugins to support the Microsoft Open XML format. The licensing is to be done under a BSD and LGPL so hopefully there's little concern that MS will will use any patents which contribute to the modules against other projects that utilize the source code contributed to OOo.