From the Blame Game dept.:
A lot of people blame Oracle and I don't think that's fair. Those decisions are actually taken inside of Star Division and if you see the history of Star Division and OpenOffice.org from Day 1 when they promised the foundation - well we've been waiting for that and the frustration got more intense over time. It was always like "We're going to do the foundation in a year", but it never happened.

Also there was always this idea that to make the foundation independent, you'd have to have this huge pile of money and this incredibly complicated organization to pay hundreds of developers and then every company would pay money into it. And this model makes no sense - it's no good for the companies, it's no good for the project to have a monolithic entity doing it all. And that colored the discussion and took the topic off the table every time this was discussed.