Seacue
the history is a bit more complicated than that - the developers actually jumped ship after Sun was sold to Oracle. Oracle made it clear that their plans for open source software were very ill-defined, and wouldn't guarantee that OO would remain in their remit. So the developers left and took their toys with them.
As to Sun doing QA work.....the main input came from many sources, a lot from the Linux companies and a very large share from IBM/Lotus. And the QA was carried out from within the OO project.
Sun really only got involved in the changes which led to their commercialised version (now dead) known as Star Office.
Remember that the program originated with the German company, Star Division, who were absorbed by Sun around 15 years ago. Sun Open Sourced Star Office as Open Office in an attempt to cut development costs.
The rationale behind buying Star Division was that it was cheaper than paying Microsoft for licences for MS Office. Same reason that IBM used the OO core code in Symphony: the development costs of Symphony were less than the tax to Microsoft to allow them to use Office across the whole business
Last edited by Milo Minderbinder; 14th May 2013 at 18:10.