October 12th, 2007
OpenOffice won't fork -- for now
In spite of a bitter battle between Novell and Sun developers, OpenOffice won’t fork – at least for now.
That’s the consensus among several OpenOffice developers who are locked in a bitter dispute with Sun over how the open source project is governed but who nevertheless agree that a fork would be the worst outcome for a project that has enough difficulty competing against Microsoft Office let alone Google Apps and other online services in the future.
“It’s not something I want to see. It’s not an ideal outcome,” said Michael Meeks, a distinguished engineer at Novell and an OpenOffice developer who maintains that an OpenOffice fork is not in the works and won’t happen — as long as Sun establishes an independent non-profit foundation like that of Mozilla or Apache to oversee OpenOffice decisions.
Concerns about a possible fork arose because the Go-OO build, an OpenOffice implementation maintained by Meeks and others, decided to include a feature that Sun rejected for inclusion in the next OpenOffice because the developer refused to sign Sun’s contributor agreement.
Meeks said in an interview that it is customary for Go-OO to include new technologies and that the latest build should not be viewed as a fork. But he hinted that a fork is not out of the question if Sun doesn’t loosen its grip on the OpenOffice project.
“It’s clear that if Sun continues to refuse to include changes under their own license then you will see a growing set of changes that can’t be included in OpenOffice, and then we’d see that delta increasing over time. Eventually, users can understand they can get a better OpenOffice than at OpenOffice.org,” Meeks said this week during a telephone interview.
Them’s fightin’ words?
Sun, for its part, is fighting back, and has characterized the controversy as a baseless attack by a rival seeking competitive advantage. Most of the vocal opponents are Novell employees.
Sun open source guru Simon Phipps also argues that OpenOffice.org is released under the LGPL, that its provisions fall under the normal bounds of community norms and that the recently enacted Sun Contributor Agreement (which replaces the Joint Contributor Agreement) does not require outside developers to surrender their copyright.
In a recent blog, OpenOffice head Jim Parkinson pointed out that Sun recently revised the Contributor Agreement to address some issues raised by the community and established OpenOffice.org Community Advisory Board designed to address and mediate contributor issues.
The new board will hold its first meeting on October 29, Sun said this week. Still Sun’s Parkinson made it clear in an e-mail response that it has no intention of changing the governance of the project, which is led by the OpenOffice Community Council.
“Out of respect to the members of the newly created OpenOffice.org Community Advisory Board and the process, we cannot comment about the structure and boundaries of the Board until after its first meeting, which is the last week of October,” Parkinson said in a company-issued statement. “The Board will not manage the project’s daily affairs, nor will it replace the OpenOffice.org’s existing governing body, the Community Council. The council will continue to do what it has done so well: resolve community issues and conflicts, set community goals, manage community funds, and most important, give a voice to the hundreds of thousands who make up the OpenOffice.org community.”
Four out of five of the project leads of the Community Council are Sun employees.
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Paula Rooney is a Boston-based writer who has followed the tech industry for almost two decades. See her full profile and disclosure of her industry affiliations.
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