{"id":1359,"date":"2010-11-07T17:10:49","date_gmt":"2010-11-07T22:10:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/2d823b65bb.nxcli.io\/?p=1359"},"modified":"2011-06-05T19:27:46","modified_gmt":"2011-06-05T23:27:46","slug":"the-legacy-of-openoffice-org","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/2010\/11\/the-legacy-of-openoffice-org.html","title":{"rendered":"The Legacy of OpenOffice.org"},"content":{"rendered":"


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When I hear the word “fork”, I reach for my gun.\u00a0 OK.\u00a0 Maybe it is not that bad.\u00a0 But in the open source world, “fork” is a loaded term.\u00a0 It can, of course, be an expression of a basic open source freedom.\u00a0 But it can also represent “fighting words”.\u00a0 It is like the way we use the term “regime” for a government we don’t like, or “cult” for a religion we disapprove of.\u00a0 Calling something a “fork” is rarely intended as a compliment.<\/p>\n

So I’ll avoid the term “fork” for the remainder of this post and instead talk about the legacy of one notable open source project, OpenOffice.org, which has over the last decade spawned numerous derivative products, some open source, some proprietary, some which fully coordinate with the main project, others which have diverged, some which have prospered and endured for many years, others which did not, some which tried to offer more than OpenOffice, and others which attempted, intentionally, to offer less, some which changed the core code\u00a0 and other which simply added extensions.<\/p>\n

If one just read the headlines over the past month one would get the mistaken notion that LibreOffice was the first attempt to take the OpenOffice.org open source code and make a different product from it, or even a separate open source project.\u00a0 This is far from true.\u00a0 There have been many spin-off products\/projects, including:<\/p>\n