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Apache OpenOffice devs consider themselves to be at war with LO (but that's fantasy, the project is dead, only its bureaucracy survives). One is copyleft and th

by Elv13 9y ago

Apache OpenOffice devs consider themselves to be at war with LO (but that's fantasy, the project is dead, only its bureaucracy survives). One is copyleft and the other copyright. One is owned by Apache while the other is the result of the cooperation of many entities. OpenOffice.org/StarOffice/Oracle_OOo/IBM_Symphony/Apache-OO have probably more users (despite being dead) because of brand recognition. Keeping these users hostage until none remains is the biggest FU they can do to the document foundation to have forked, so they did. edit: Added the other brands OOo is known by

catach 9y ago
> because of brand recognition. I assume long-term corporate support contracts play a large part, too.
- Elv13 9y ago
  I don't think so. When LO forked, Oracle disbanded the whole OOo team (AFAIK). When they did, IBM was furious and that ended up causing the move to Apache. In return, IBM merged their commercial fork into Apache OO to save the project. But then something unexpected happened, LO rebased thousand of commits (a huge effort) on top of the IBM code dump. That allowed them to resolve copyright issues. But it also killed IBM attempt to revive OpenOffice. I think most support contracts went to SuSE(?) or Collabora, the entities that actually make money from those contracts as a business model instead of sponsoring OOo to save themselves money on MS Office licenses.