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Except that it's not that uncommon, The Oracle/Novell conflict that gave us LibreOffice is an example of the trademark owner being derived of significant revenu

Except that it's not that uncommon, The Oracle/Novell conflict that gave us LibreOffice is an example of the trademark owner being derived of significant revenue by a more competent contributor who when the owner tried to take back control forked the project so successfully that the trademark on openoffice became almost worthless over the span of a few years. The hosting providers have always absorbed a huge amount of the revenue from opensource web infrastructure without a direct payment line back to the trademark holder, as companies like SUSE and RedHat acts as successful middlemen and co-developers of a lot of frameworks they don't have the trademark on. The idea that owning a trademark on an opensource project entitle you to the bulk of the revenue started in the VC circus about a decade ago prior to that you did it for other reasons or as a part of an consultancy operation in collaboration with a wider community. The OpenSource by license but build by a single company model expecting to operate on the shareware model of the 1980ies PC industry is what's new not the existence of non-paying hosting companies or large enterprises as potential rivals for support revenue.

jdsully 8y ago
And yet if you look on Google Trends you can see that Open Office has 15x the number of searches LibreOffice has. Trademarks are incredibly sticky in people's minds and forks are hard to pull off. I have experience here as I run a multi-threaded fork of Redis and people constantly ask if we have the same features.
- afiori 8y ago
  as anecdotal evidence everyone I saw use "openoffice" in the last 6+ years was actually using libreoffice and calling it openoffice (it was in italy, so language can be a factor. openoffice has a more natural sound than libreoffice)
- cowb0yl0gic 8y ago
  Part of this may have to do that OpenOffice is more enterprise-oriented, so maybe more likely to be recommended by IT people with exposure to it, and more likely to be used in an organizational context. I actually recently searched for "openoffice" when I meant "libreoffice" (which I switched to years ago). So definitely inertia in various manifestations. I think this is why some forked projects make little effort to maintain "mental continuity" (visual, naming) with their parent; it might be just as well to appear as something entirely distinct from the beginning.

jdsully 8y ago

And yet if you look on Google Trends you can see that Open Office has 15x the number of searches LibreOffice has. Trademarks are incredibly sticky in people's minds and forks are hard to pull off. I have experience here as I run a multi-threaded fork of Redis and people constantly ask if we have the same features.

afiori 8y ago
as anecdotal evidence everyone I saw use "openoffice" in the last 6+ years was actually using libreoffice and calling it openoffice (it was in italy, so language can be a factor. openoffice has a more natural sound than libreoffice)
cowb0yl0gic 8y ago
Part of this may have to do that OpenOffice is more enterprise-oriented, so maybe more likely to be recommended by IT people with exposure to it, and more likely to be used in an organizational context. I actually recently searched for "openoffice" when I meant "libreoffice" (which I switched to years ago). So definitely inertia in various manifestations. I think this is why some forked projects make little effort to maintain "mental continuity" (visual, naming) with their parent; it might be just as well to appear as something entirely distinct from the beginning.