History of Software Forks Favors LibreOffice 149
jfruhlinger writes "The forking of LibreOffice from the OpenOffice.org project, followed by Oracle's donation of OpenOffice.org to the Apache Software Foundation, has been something of a bumpy road. But if history is any guide, it's the fork, LibreOffice, that might have the brighter future."
Re:Just look at the cleanups (Score:4, Informative)
Re-merge the projects (a la gcc/egcs)
I'd wish you luck, but... you and what army of reuniters?
name it OpenOffice (without the ".org")
Riiiight. Ready to buy out everyone with a stake to the OpenOffice name?
and call it a day.
sure, it would be easy as pie...
Re:Just look at the cleanups (Score:5, Informative)
The project and software are commonly known as OpenOffice, but this term is trademarked both in the Netherlands, by a company co-founded by Wouter Hanegraaff, and also, independently, in the UK by Orange UK.
OpenOffice.org [wikipedia.org]
It's all about the community (Score:5, Informative)
XFree86 died when the community got up and left. Even with free hosting, the remaining XFree86 partisans couldn't keep it alive and lost interest.
Before that, the X Consortium - backed by the might of industry - died when no-one could be found to participate in it ... because XFree86 was where the action (i.e., community) was.
Citizendium forked from Wikipedia, recruited a pile of academics, then Larry Sanger drove them away [rationalwiki.org]. (And then the cranks moved in [rationalwiki.org].) When someone said "chaps, CZ is dead" and tried another fork, they called him ... a "traitor" [davidgerard.co.uk]. This from the project that was a fork itself.
XOrg is under the MIT X11 licence, but seems to get plenty of contributions back - because it's where the community is. An open source licence with centripetal force from the gravitational pull of the community.
Wayland's lead developers and all the people pushing for it in Fedora are X.Org developers. They're not "traitors" to X, they're people with their eye on the target: a good open source desktop.
EGCS won by the community getting up and leaving GCC.
LibreOffice won when the community got up and left Oracle. Oracle and IBM's approach in trying to claw it back is gibberingly, hilariously misconceived. (And Rob Weir blew his cred irretrievably lying about what the FSF had said and directing abuse at the FSF rep who tried to correct his lie. Once a shill equals a shill.)
OOo=XFree86 with a sponsor. Yay sponsors. Can IBM employ enough contributors to single-handedly make up for the enthusiasm to be found at LibreOffice? I really doubt it.
Re:Bad strategic moves by Oracle (Score:4, Informative)
Even MS has no idea what the formats are, and they vary randomly from one version to another. (Eg save from Word 2007 to Word 95 format does not produce a reliable result, and may produce a document that is not even readable by Word 95).
LibreOffice is better than MS Word when it comes to editing tables, and is more user friendly, according to a lot of the users I support.
As to exporting in pdf format, sure, once you have the final document we insist on it, but while the document is in development, and has to be edited by people in different locales, its not the answer. (I don't think MS support yo_NG, en_IE and other useful locales anyway.)