"Novell is making OpenOffice.org incompatible with itself."Remind yourselves of Novell's 'special' edition of OpenOffice.org, which only works in Windows and has some different legal implications. Also recall what we said back in March: Novell is making OpenOffice.org incompatible with itself.
Many of these discussions began last year when Groklaw grokked some stuff about Novell forking OpenOffice.org -- a contention that Shane was quick to defend.
So, here we are less than a year later. Novell keeps taking its own route. It will be interesting to see where this work is going and how it develops. How does IBM fit into this picture with Symphony?
Comments
David
2007-10-03 20:05:49
"Of course, this is not a new thing, we've always distributed a custom flavour of OO.o derived from ooo-build, as have many other Linux distributions, but recently, with the new SuSE build service and a (finally) updated web-site, we hope to be able to make development versions more widely available (including on Win32) at http://go-oo.org; you can grab Kohei's solver there today." http://www.gnome.org/~michael/activity.html#2007-10-02
Tracking upstream, applying your own patches, sending those patches upstream and creating packages using those patches is not a fork.
Roy Schestowitz
2007-10-03 20:37:18
David
2007-10-03 21:09:31
To me, the only thing noteworthy from this story is the beurocracy of getting patches into upstream openoffice. I think Sun should look at why there is a need for an external development tree in the first place.
Roy Schestowitz
2007-10-03 21:13:30
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/04/2136205
Will they modify the latest headline? I wonder...
I'm still unfamiliar with the technical differences between a fork and a branch and particularly when one crosses the line.