Way to go GNOME with your cvs to subversion conversion!
Novell / Ximian has had their own edition of openoffice.org for years. Everything they do is made as patches ready to go upstream so the patches can be merged with the mainline edition. If Novell/Ximian never did this, you would have a broken openoffice.org. This is the same with other distributions. Ubuntu Linux does not distribute the vanilla openoffice.org other.
From what I have seen, it is a major pain in the ass to get sun engineers to get open office.org patches moving along.
I do wish groklaw.net would stop spreading FUD. I thought they were about finding the facts. It appears not!