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Sun Refuses LGPL for OpenOffice; Novell forks
TRS-80 writes "Kohei Yoshida wrote a long post on the history of Calc Solver, an optimization solver module for the Calc component of OpenOffice.org. After three years of jumping through Sun's hoops on his own time, Sun says it will duplicate the work because Kohei doesn't want to sign over ownership of the code. Adding insult to injury, Sun then invites him join this duplication. Because of Sun's refusal to accept LPGL extensions in the upstream code, Michael Meeks (who recently talked about Sun's OO.o community failings, and ODF and OOXML) has announced ooo-build (previously just for build fixes) is now a formal fork of OpenOffice to be located at http://go-oo.org/. "
That's actually the nice thing about the OASIS format, it's already documented and standardized. Other office suites, such as Koffice; already use OASIS so the standard already has more weight than any office suite. In the end I would think that the fork will probably go nowhere, but if it does gain momentum then we can probably only benefit from the competition. A lot of people like to bitch any time effort is duplicated and any fork (or competition) is a waste of time, but those people only need to look at XFree86 (remember those guys?) vs Xorg. From what I understand, Sun drives away a considerable amount of support by wanting to be in total control instead of a steward of the project, so maybe a fork will produce results.