Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Use the forks Luke!

Luke Skywalker: These chopsticks are driving me nuts!
Darth Vader: Use the forks Luke, use the forks.

A few big forks in the open source world: OpenOffice.org has become LibreOffice and Open Solaris has become Open Indiana. I've installed Libreoffice and have been quite impressed with it. For one thing, mail merges work perfectly (something I've always struggled with in Open Office) as well as a few other nice touches.
But perhaps the most interesting thing about these forks is that their presence reminds us that no large company can ever control an open source project. As soon as Oracle began putting noses out of joint over their handling of Sun's open source assets, the community just up and left, taking its goodwill with it. A cautionary tale for quite a few companies I would have thought.

1 comment:

  1. Yes - LibreOffice is a breath of fresh air and we can expect many more good things from this fork.

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