With Novell, there’s Microsoft money on the table (Sun is another story). Trust erodes because OOo is a “biggest competitor” to Microsoft (it says so explicitly). I wrote some more bits about it this morning. They shelter Windows, OOXML, .NET/VBA, etc.

1. Sun are ridiculously slow taking in the patches of others. This is why the Novell fork existed – it started as the Ximian fork, many years ago.
2. Sun refuse to accept contributions to OOo where you have not signed the copyright over to Sun in such a way that they can proprietise it. I realise this is what Novell do with Mono, but that doesn’t make it a good idea either.

It’s open source – when a project is being badly hampered by being run as a cathedral, a fork run as a bazaar is just the thing.

Old news. It’s not a fork, it a OO build with patches that are not yet accepted upstream (since accepting patches by Sun seems to be sooo slow).

The go-oo.org builds are used in Debian, Gentoo and Ubuntu; also the Mac OS NeoOffice is based on it.

You, too, are probably using it but that doesn’t stop you from bad-mouthing the company behind it, eh?

Novell is a bad company.

s/bad/mcrosoft/

This was predictable. Thanks for the headsup.

I know this is not a place for this but look this:

http://go-oo.org/discover/

A OO fork with a lot of M$ capabilities

Look the authors ; )

Novell is a bad company.