Oracle's acquisition of Sun is still grinding along, but while the gears are still turning I'd like to throw in a request: Make OpenOffice an open-core product. Keep the main program free, but charge for the useful bonuses.

As useful as OpenOffice is -- and I use it pretty consistently as a replacement for many parts of Microsoft Office 2007 -- there are still things about it I find terribly lacking. It's missing functionality that I need and that I can't even buy to add to the product. (The ability to buy additional functionality is a feature, and an underrated one.)

I've complained consistently about the lack of a decent spelling and grammar-checking component in OO.o. The program has a framework for same, into which you can plug any number of community-authored add-ons, but said add-ons barely cover the needed territory at all. (There's no contextual spell-checking, for instance, which is handy if like me most of your misspellings are transposed letters that can often make one word masquerade as another.)

An open-core approach would go a long way towards solving this and many other, similar problems that plague OO.o. For one, it would mean Sun/Oracle now has a direct revenue stream (even if only a small one) that they can use to further fund the development of both the suite and its add-ons. And stuff like grammar and spelling modules need to be done right; the thrown-together, ad-hoc stuff they have now is downright embarrassing.

There's distant hints that something like this might be in the offing, but I'm not holding my breath. Last week Oracle revised its FAQ for how they're planning to deal with Sun, and I found this graf on how they plan to handle OpenOffice.

What is Oracle's plan for OpenOffice?

Oracle has a history of developing complete, integrated, and open products, making integration quicker and less costly for our customers. Based on the open ODF standard, OpenOffice is expected to create a compelling desktop integration bridge for our enterprise customers and offers consumers another choice on the desktop. After the transaction closes, Oracle plans to continue developing and supporting OpenOffice as open source. As before, some of the larger customers will ask for extra assurances, support, and enterprise tools. For these customers we expect to offer a typical commercial license option.

No word about setting up a separate foundation to accelerate OpenOffice development, which would by itself have been useful. The "commercial license option" could be anything, really -- from an open-core approach to just selling commercial support for bigger customers. The latter seems much more likely, as I doubt Oracle suddenly wants to find itself in the office-suite business per se.

Microsoft, meanwhile, is not going to wait for free office suites eat its lunch. It's Oracle's move; I just hope they do something that fosters that much more use -- and in turn, development -- of OpenOffice.

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