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.)

IBM's Symphony Bolsters the ODF Choir

Goodness knows why it has taken so long, but IBM finally seems to have woken up to the fact that throwing all its weight behind ODF is much better than vaguely supporting it:

I.B.M. plans to mount its most ambitious challenge in years to Microsoft’s dominance of personal computer software, by offering free programs for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations.

The company is announcing the desktop software, called I.B.M. Lotus Symphony, at an event today in New York. The programs will be available as free downloads from the I.B.M. Web site.

...

Its offerings are versions of open-source software developed in a consortium called OpenOffice.org. The original code traces its origins to a German company, Star Division, which Sun Microsystems bought in 1999. Sun later made the desktop software, now called StarOffice, an open-source project, in which work and code are freely shared.

I.B.M.’s engineers have been working with OpenOffice technology for some time. But last week, I.B.M. declared that it was formally joining the open-source group, had dedicated 35 full-time programmers to the project and would contribute code to the initiative.

This won't lead to any sudden change in OpenOffice.org's fortunes, but it will add to the growing pressure on Microsoft's Office suite. And as Firefox has shown, constant dripping does indeed wear away the stone.