Byfield on Rumors of a Fork
Bruce Byfield cuts through some of the recent confusion about whether Novell is going to fork OpenOffice.org in “Novell is not forking OpenOffice“.
I am glad to see vigorous debate within the OOo community, as it means there are a lot of passionate concerned members who want the best for the project overall.
In general, in fact, it seems the OOo community has gotten a lot stronger recently, with new members IBM and Beijing RedFlag 2000, and Sun implementing new processes to better communicate with community members:
“According to Meeks, Novell is not stopping cooperation with Sun. “We contribute more than half our code to what we see as the core of OpenOffice,” Meek says, referring to bug-fixes and revisions of existing applications and subsystems. He also acknowledges that, recently, “Sun has really been improving how they deal with the community,” citing such improvements as an engineering steering committee that he says has resulted in “much faster patch turnarounds. So, on one level, that’s really encouraging.”
There is room for improvement in the way the community operates, but there is reason for strong optimism too, as the future looks ever brighter for the OpenOffice.org project.