3 ms·

You're exactly right. The developers were mad at the project governance, and it hit a peak when Oracle bought out Sun. They created Go-OO, where they had more

You're exactly right. The developers were mad at the project governance, and it hit a peak when Oracle bought out Sun. They created Go-OO, where they had more freedom to do their work without being stifled by the project's management, and this became LO. And yes, forks are an effective defense mechanism against governance problems in FOSS projects. We saw it here, and we saw it years before with XFree86. Forks are an expression of democracy, where the people who actually do most of the work decide their leaders are ineffective or bad, and leave and make their own project, but thanks to FOSS licensing, they don't have to start from scratch, and are able to "fork" the code and continue their work largely without interruption.

simosx 10y ago
This is another timeline mistake. Go-oo was created in 2003, not in 2010! Even that early in the history of OpenOffice.org, there were problems with the development of the office suite. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go-oo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go-oo The timeline goes like this: 1. Sun Microsystems released the first version of OpenOffice.org in 2000. 2. There were issues with building the software on Linux, therefore go-oo was created in 2003. The mismanagement of the community was brewing so long ago, as the OpenOffice.org core developers were not community-savvy. 3. Sun Microsystems were bought by Oracle and there was some hope that things would change to the better. Things did not get better, Oracle practically gave up on OpenOffice.org and the developers forked the source into LibreOffice. LibreOffice started in January 2011. 4. Oracle had enough with OpenOffice.org and wanted to get rid of it. Sadly, they asked IBM and Rob Weir to help them. While LibreOffice was already getting established, they decided to donate all of OpenOffice.org to the Apache Software Foundation. The Apache Software Foundation does not have any experience with software intended for end-users such as office suite software. They mismanaged the whole thing. Among the mistakes, they would release new versions infrequently, they spent two years before they made any efforts to attract translators, documentation, QA team. What is happening now is painful. The majority of Windows users end up finding openoffice.org and download the obsolete version of Apache OpenOffice. OpenOffice.org existed for a decade and the non-technical users still remember "openoffice". If these users were shifted to LibreOffice, it would be tremendous help to advance LibreOffice even further.

simosx 10y ago

This is another timeline mistake. Go-oo was created in 2003, not in 2010! Even that early in the history of OpenOffice.org, there were problems with the development of the office suite. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go-oo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go-oo The timeline goes like this: 1. Sun Microsystems released the first version of OpenOffice.org in 2000. 2. There were issues with building the software on Linux, therefore go-oo was created in 2003. The mismanagement of the community was brewing so long ago, as the OpenOffice.org core developers were not community-savvy. 3. Sun Microsystems were bought by Oracle and there was some hope that things would change to the better. Things did not get better, Oracle practically gave up on OpenOffice.org and the developers forked the source into LibreOffice. LibreOffice started in January 2011. 4. Oracle had enough with OpenOffice.org and wanted to get rid of it. Sadly, they asked IBM and Rob Weir to help them. While LibreOffice was already getting established, they decided to donate all of OpenOffice.org to the Apache Software Foundation. The Apache Software Foundation does not have any experience with software intended for end-users such as office suite software. They mismanaged the whole thing. Among the mistakes, they would release new versions infrequently, they spent two years before they made any efforts to attract translators, documentation, QA team. What is happening now is painful. The majority of Windows users end up finding openoffice.org and download the obsolete version of Apache OpenOffice. OpenOffice.org existed for a decade and the non-technical users still remember "openoffice". If these users were shifted to LibreOffice, it would be tremendous help to advance LibreOffice even further.