When last seen Oracle was ignoring the fact that OpenOffice.org was the victim of an attempted hijacking by a dissident bunch of largely European developers who formed the independent, vendor-neutral Document Foundation and, Oracle failing to meet its demand to relinquish the OpenOffice brand, forked the code into LibreOffice.

In this week's episode Oracle turns up at the Open Document Format Plugfest in Brussels full of open source bonhomie, welcome mats for outside contributions and promises of continued development support to "demonstrate its commitment to the OpenOffice.org community."

It came bearing OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 and OpenOffice.org 3.3 Beta, new versions of the free open source widgetry said to add features and improve performance.

Meanwhile, the Document Foundation, which had the support of Google, Red Hat, Canonical and Novell from the get-go - all folks not exactly on Oracle's Christmas card list - has sprouted a "Next Decade Manifesto" laying out its values.

It rejects "the ownership of office productivity tools by monopoly suppliers which imposes a de facto tax on global electronic free speech and penalizes the economically disadvantaged; the creeping domination of computer desktops by a single language forcing people to learn a foreign language before they can express themselves electronically; the ownership of file formats by proprietary software companies - documents belong to their creators, not software vendors;" and "closed software development process where errors can lie hidden and poor quality is accepted."

See http://www.documentfoundation.org/pdf/tdf_manifesto.pdf.