What we know about Oracle Cloud Office, OpenOffice.org

Most successfully, French open-source start-up Ulteo used its application streaming technology to host OpenOffice.org on the Web. That attracted 95,000 users, who enjoyed better over-the-wire performance than from the desktop version of OpenOffice.org, said CEO Thierry Koehrlen. Ulteo was never approached by Sun to help develop a Web version, he said.

3. How might Oracle deliver it

Even before the acquisition closed, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is said to have "encouraged" OpenOffice.org developers to start rewriting the app using Sun's Rich Internet Application (RIA) platform, JavaFX.

Michael Meeks, the Novell Inc. developer who launched the Go-OO branch of OpenOffice.org, is pessimistic about JavaFX, saying its semi-proprietary licensing is an obstacle for the open-source app, and it poses other technical problems.

He is also not in favor of using standards-based Web technology. "If this is some CSS + JavaScript monster a WYSWYG editor is near impossible," he blogged last week. "I'm not convinced that HTML5 provides enough to do this adequately either."