Interview with Charles-H. Schulz on Open Standards

As you may have noticed, open standards are a hot topic currently. One person who deals with them all the time in a variety of ways is Charles-H. Schulz.

That's because he's one of the leaders of The Document Foundation, home to the LibreOffice fork of the ODF-based OpenOffice.org, and he's also on the board of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS). The following is an interview exploring his views about standards - open and not so open.

On Open Enterprise blog.

OpenOffice.org: Freedom on a Fork

Regular readers of this column will know that I'm something of a fan of forks, but even I was surprised when OpenOffice.org was forked by the Document Foundation six months ago.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Nokia's Not-so-cute Qt Move

When I was reviewing the fall-out from Nokia's decision to stake its future on Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 system, I mentioned parenthetically that I thought it likely the Qt division would be sold. It turns out I was right, although Nokia has chosen to do this in an unusual way:

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Deeper Significance of LibreOffice 3.3

Over on the RedMonk blog, there's an entertaining post by James Governor on the subject of forks, prompted by the imminent arrival of a major new version of Android, version 3.0, code-named “Honeycomb”, designed with tablets in mind:

On Open Enterprise blog.

OpenOffice.org Discovers the Joy of Forking

Last week I wrote a piece entitled “Are We Entering the Golden Age of Forks?” I concluded:

I predict we are going to see plenty more forks in the near future as the community starts to re-assert itself. I also think that this tendency will lead to more independent foundations being set up to oversee the development of free software

Little did I suspect that we would see this quite so soon:

On Open Enterprise blog.

Are We Entering the Golden Age of Forks?

In July 1998, the Frenchman Gaël Duval released his new GNU/Linux distribution called Mandrake-Linux. It was a fork of Red Hat using the KDE desktop - something that Red Hat itself was unwilling to provide because at that time the underlying Qt libraries were not open source. In 2005, the company set up to develop Mandrake-Linux further, MandrakeSoft, purchased the Brazilian open source company Conectiva, and the resulting distribution of the combined forces was re-named Mandriva. And now Mandriva is returning to its roots as a fork by being forked, as a new distro called Mageia:

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Saga of Git: Lightning does Strike Twice

Every now and then, a shiver runs through the Linux community as people realise afresh that the entire edifice has a single point of failure: Linus Torvalds. These episodes usually manifest themselves as concerns about the scalability of said individual – whether he can continue to oversee and manage the amazing distributed development model as it grows ever bigger and more ambitious. To counter those fears it is probably worth looking at what happened as a result of the first – and by far the most frightening - “Linus does not scale” episode, not least because it led to multiple positive outcomes.

On The H Open.

Should *Mozilla* Fork Firefox?

Apparently, there's an interesting thread over on a site called Quora about the future of Firefox. I say apparently, since I can't seem to join the site (“we'll e-mail when we're ready for you to try out the service” - thanks a bunch: obviously it's only for the Chosen Few). Anyway, according to TechCrunch, the meat of the argument is this:

On Open Enterprise blog.

Of Android and the Fear of Fragmentation

Many were sceptical when Google announced that it was launching another mobile platform. After all, some said, there are already multiple offerings out there, and Google had precisely no track record in this sector: surely it was heading for a fall? The launch of the first Android phone, the G1, seemed to confirm these doubts. Although capable enough, it was clearly not going to carry Android through into the mainstream.

On The H.

The Great Oracle Experiment

So, it finally happened:

We are pleased to announce that Oracle has completed its acquisition of Sun Microsystems and Sun is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Oracle. With this news, we want to reiterate our commitment to deliver complete, open and integrated systems that help our customers improve the performance, reliability and security of their IT infrastructure. We would also like to thank the many customers that have supported us throughout the acquisition process....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Forking Nagios: Behold Icinga

One of the unique features of free software is that it can be forked. Indeed, it is one of the most powerful incentives for projects to hew close to their users. If they stray too far, someone might decide that enough is enough, and fork the project to produce something closer to their needs.

Whether that project thrives is a matter of support: if it meets a genuine need in the community, it will pick up users and coders. If it does not, it will wither.

Against that background, the following news is rather exciting...

On Open Enterprise blog.

Who Owns Commercial Open Source – and Can Forks Work?

Three years ago, Tom Foremski wrote an interesting piece called “Adapt or die--the choice facing the open source movement“, which began:

Can Larry Ellison be stopped? By which I mean could Oracle shut down the fledgling open-source software movement through a series of acquisitions??

On Linux Journal.

MySQL, YourSQL, OurSQL

Jeremy Zawodny, ex-Yahoo, currently at Craigslist, is generally regarded as one of the gurus of the MySQL world. His recent thoughts on the evolution of that project – called, significantly, “The New MySQL Landscape” - are therefore particularly interesting, not least because it uses the “f”-word: fork....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Wackypedia: the Wikipedia fork

On Linux Journal.

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.)

KompoZer: Recomposing Nvu

One of the critical apps in any software ecosystem is a web authoring system. Until recently, the main free software offering was Nvu, but things had gone rather quiet on this front. With the launch of KompoZer, "Nvu's unofficial bug-fix release", we find out why:

Why call it «KompoZer» instead of «Nvu»? Because « Nvu and the Nvu logo are trademarks of Linspire Inc. » As Linspire stopped the development of Nvu, there is no legal way to correct any bug in Nvu.

God bless forks. Let's hope this time the project receives enough support from the community to join the open source pantheon of serious apps. (Via Linux.com.)

Forking Xara LX

It is a truism in the open source world that the threat of a fork keeps code honest. When contributors who disagree with the way a project is going can simply start their own, there is a powerful incentive to take account of their concerns.

There was a great demonstration of how something as painful as a fork can, in fact, be cathartic, leading to a better, stronger result:

The Xara LX vector graphics editor took a big step forward last week. After months of gridlock between open source contributors to the project and its corporate owners, one of the contributors published his own fork of the code base -- and the company approved, offering to host it in the official Subversion repository.

Citizendium Unforks

Citizendium is a wonderful test of many things, and it just became even more interesting because it has decided to unfork itself from Wikipedia:

After considerable deliberation, indicating broad support, we have decided to delete all inactive Wikipedia articles from the Citizendium pilot project wiki. This will leave us with only those articles that we’ve been working on. The deletion will take place on Saturday at noon, Eastern time.

This is an experiment. In other words, we’re quite seriously thinking of not forking Wikipedia after all. If we see more activity on the wiki, which is what I expect, then the Wikipedia articles will stay deleted.

(Via Open Access News.)

Opening Up

Barely a week after Linden Lab freed the code of the Second Life viewer, we have a fork: Open SL. Not much there, yet, but this is going to be fun.

Fork Your Data

Eric says:

The more we can, for example, let users move their data around, never trap the data of an end user, let them move it if they don't like us, the better.

Nothing like the threat of a fork to keep 'em honest. (Via Slashdot.)