The Art of the Fork

I noted yesterday how useful the fork can be. But forking well is not easy. Here's an interesting example of how not to do it.

IBM recently made its Lotus Symphony office suite freely available (though not as free software so far as I can tell). That's good(-ish), since it supports ODF, and helps boost that standard. Less good is the fact that it is based on a fork of OpenOffice.org - or, more precisely, an old fork:

I grabbed the attention of a community software engineer, who had a quick peek under the bonnet and soon discovered this was a very old version 1.x release of OpenOffice.org, with a new user interface and a rebranding exercise to make it look like an IBM product. My colleague had a happy ten minutes testing which Easter eggs the IBM thought police had found, and which ones they hadn’t.

Forking code is all very well, but as Lotus Symphony shows, getting left behind by the main trunk is always a danger. (Via Kaj Kandler.)