[Poser]

“no real company is going to switch over to some open source program that might not be around in a year.”

I’m not sure I understand this as well as I would like to. Are you saying that the OO software will magically disappear from my computers in 12 months? I figure that since it reads and writes .doc and .xls files that it doesn’t really matter if it evaporates, but I suspect it won’t.

I think the newer versions are able to deal with .docx and .xlsx files already, making upgrades unnecessary for the next several years, assuming that the xml format becomes an industry standard.

[ShadowAce]

Just like Oracle buying Sun and absorbing MySQL won't do away with MySQL. There's been quite a bit of speculation that Oracle will kill MySQL due to the competition with it's on DB.

However, the original maintainer/owner of MySQL has already stated he will take the previous version that is open source, and continue to develop it.

Open source allows that. Proprietary software does not. I see more risk of a piece of software disappearing if it's proprietary than if it's open source.