10.03.07
Novell Forks OpenOffice.org
The Sun Microsystems way and the Novell way
Here we go. An idea that we have been kicking around for quite some time (since last year, in fact) has been officially made a reality. Novell is taking its own direction with OpenOffice.org.
“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?
Highlight: Novell was the first to acknowledge that Microsoft FUD tactics had substance. Novell then used anti-Linux FUD to market itself. 
Highlight: Xandros let Microsoft make patent claims and brag about (paid-for) OOXML support. 
Highlight: Linspire's CEO not only fell into Microsoft arms, but he also assisted the company's attack on GNU/Linux. 
Highlight: Microsoft craves pseudo (proprietary) standards and gets its way using proxies and influence which it buys. 
Highlight: The invasion into the open source world is intended to leave Linux companies neglected, due to financial incentives from Microsoft. 
Analysis: Xen, an open source hypervisor, possibly fell victim to Microsoft's aggressive (and stealthy) acquisition-by-proxy strategy.
David said,
October 3, 2007 at 3:05 pm
Hi Roy. As far as I can see there is absolutly nothing new here.
“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 said,
October 3, 2007 at 3:37 pm
At the time, some people said it was branch, but Slashdot seems to be calling it a fork now. Have you looked at this and this? Standards are being compromised.
David said,
October 3, 2007 at 4:09 pm
Well if Slashdot says its a fork, it must be true
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 said,
October 3, 2007 at 4:13 pm
Fair point.
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.