Re: [libreoffice-users] LibreOffice forks

On 10/15/2014 06:12 PM, Bruce Byfield wrote:
> On Wednesday 15 October 2014 10:56:28 PM Italo Vignoli wrote:
> > On 15/10/14 22:26, Stefan Weigel wrote:
> > > > All projects using OOo code are forks under the technical point
> > > > of view, as they have cloned the repository and applied
> > > > significant changes to the code.
> > > Sure, the technical point of view. :-) But who cares about technics? ;-)
> > Of course, I know the story (I am one of the founders). So, I totally
> > share your emotional point of view.
> >
> > OTOH, Bruce Byfield is a journalist, and we owe journalists factual
> > informations and not emotional ones.
> This is on my own time, so nobody needs to worry about being quoted.
>
> But, now that you mention it, if I were to claim in print that LibreOffice
> wasn't a fork, I would receive dozens of people correcting me and calling me
> ignorant.
>
> Anyway, my memory of OpenOffice.org is that it was a rather unhappy project,
> repressed by Sun. LibreOffice seems to have much better morale and productivity.

I went from MS Office 2003 to OpenOffice.org when OOo was able to 
read/write the .doc files I was using.  Actually, I was using it before 
they were saving files as .doc - OOo 1.x??.  I was using both Windows 
and Ubuntu-based OSs at that time so I needed something that would work 
on both systems.  Then just around Christmas I read about LibreOffice 
coming out with its first public release.  I ended up installing the 
last RC version before the "official" release came out.  I un-installed 
OOo on most of my systems in favor of LO since that point.

Yes, LO is "officially" a fork of OOo, but at that time OOo was a 
"virtual dead project" with the lack of "support" by Sun.  Of course the 
fact that when LO's first release came out, articles started to show up 
about how much better Lo was over the "OOo project" and LO was soon the 
default of a large percent of the Linux distros that came out within 
months of LO's release - and "dumping" OOo as the default office package.

OOo was stagnant and the people who decided to create a fork of the OOo 
project and start it moving with the badly needed updates and 
improvements.  So the LibreOffice project took off while OOo faded into 
the background.  Of course then Sun finally decided that OOo was a "dead 
project" for their company and ended up "selling" it, including the 
rights to the name, to Apache.

The key to me is not whether or not it is a fork, child, or any other 
relation to the original OOo project, but the fact that the people 
behind LibreOffice in the early days decided that they did not want to 
see the idea of an FOSS office suite package to die do to the lack of 
"caring" by the one who owns the brand name of the current FOSS 
package.  These people decided enough was enough and started to do the 
work on the code base and make the improvements needed, without waiting 
for another 3, 4, 6, or even 8 months till the next version release of 
the original project to come about. Thank goodness that these people did 
that.

Now we have a maturing project that has seen 4 years of work.  LO has 
become what OOo should have become but did not and maybe would not 
without the push from our early developers.  There are people who look 
at both the LO project and the AOo project, both starting from nearly 
the same point in the code cycle of OOo.  I have not read anything where 
it makes me believe that the AOo project has the "passion" of its users 
and developers as the LO project has been for the past 3 or 4 years.  
None of my tech e-newsletters have had articles [so far as I have seen] 
that talks about the advances in the open source office suite project[s] 
being part of the AOo suite.  Every one of these articles talk about LO 
advancing the free and open source office suite development and 
advancing its market share in the free and/or paid office suite market.  
Every time I read anything about an office suite that is free or one to 
use instead of MS Office, the name of LibreOffice comes up.

IMO - MS is doing a lot of things with their office suite package lines 
that lead me to believe that LibreOffice is starting to get some people 
at MS headquarters worrying about our free and open source office suite 
package and what will happen to MS's market share as more and more 
people are going toward free software over MS's paid software.

No matter what LibreOffice is, fork, child, or whatever, there is no 
doubt in my mind that more and more people are turning to LibreOffice 
for their office suite needs.




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