Enter IBM, accompanied by Symphony

So does IBM, which is joining OpenOffice.org and creating its own free version called Lotus Symphony, aimed at its enterprise and government customers.

"We think that there's a broad-based consensus that some governance and structural changes are in order that would make the OpenOffice project more attractive to others," Doug Heintzman, director of strategy for IBM's Lotus Software, said in an interview last week. "It's no secret that this has been an issue for us for some time, and we haven't viewed OpenOffice.org as being as healthy as it might be in this respect."

Besides committing 35 China developers to OpenOffice.org, IBM plans to make its voice heard -- immediately and loudly. IBM will "work within the leadership structure that exists," said Sean Poulley, vice president of business and strategy in IBM's Lotus Software division. "But we will take our rightful leadership position in the community along with Sun and others."

Suarez-Potts did not return repeated requests for comment. But Erwin Tenhumberg, community development and marketing manager for OpenOffice.org and a Sun employee in its Hamburg, Germany office where OpenOffice / StarOffice development is centered, acknowledged the criticism.

"There's a long tradition at Sun of not paying attention to outside contributors because there weren't many for a long time," said Tenhumberg, who estimated that 90 percent of the programming in OpenOffice 2.0, the last major release from two years ago, was done by Sun employees.

Alexandro Colorado, who helps run a project to create a Spanish-language version of OpenOffice, said while many of the criticisms leveled OpenOffice.org's management are valid, "there are other sides of the story than just pure bashing."

He blamed "exponential" growth in OpenOffice's code base, a situation that has been partly corrected after the group began to limit development in the core OpenOffice code and ask developers to build new features in the form of "extensions," a model successfully used by the Firefox web browser.

"So far we have exciting extensions like Google Docs integration with OpenOffice.org," Colorado wrote in an e-mail. "This would have taken ages to integrate into the code base and now it's available in a matter of weeks."

Another OpenOffice.org community developer, Charles H. Schulz, says that much of the criticism is simply misplaced.

"Unfortunately, some Novell engineers' behavior and vision of what the OpenOffice.org project should be and should not be leave me and others appalled by their misunderstanding of what a community really is," he said. "I think the real issue with Novell now has more to do with individual egos and agendas than anything else."