Martin @ Blog » OpenOffice.org

Novell creates OpenOffice.org fork

Martin Sturm — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 09:15:23 +0000

It seems that Novell created a fork of OpenOffice.org. The cause of this action is the fact that the Sun Microsystems currently controls the entire development process of OpenOffice.org and requires contributers to transfer code ownership to Sun. Some of them, for example the creator of a linear solver for OO.o Calc refuses to do so. Novell now provides a version of OO.o which incorporate these patches. I’m not sure if this will benefit the development of OpenOffice.org in a significant and positive way. It is a shame that Sun is making all key decisions with regard to the future of OpenOffice.org and as such preventing the developer community introducing novel ideas.
I still think that OO.o is missing an opportunity by effectively building an MS Office clone instead of a Office suite which implement the same functionality in a better (or at least different) way.

Microsoft winner of ‘Best campaigner against OOXML’

Martin Sturm — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 08:37:12 +0000

I think this post is rather funny. I think it is also noteworthy that Microsoft is also the owner of a ISO standard proposal with the largest number of comments…

ZDNet interview with Michael Meeks

Martin Sturm — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 06:33:38 +0000

ZDNet published an interview with Novell employee Michael Meeks, who is working on OpenOffice.org and Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10. Intersting read, though not much news.