“From recent media reports, casual readers could easily believe
that OpenOffice.org, the popular free office suite, is fragmenting.
Slashdot reported last week that Novell is backing an official
fork, while Ars Technica suggested that if what was happening fell
short of a fork, then it was still “serious fragmentation” and “not
a good thing for the OpenOffice.org community.” However, a closer
look at the situation shows that what is happening is less of a
dramatic split than the airing of long-time grievances and the
media’s discovery of a long-established institution.“The alarm first arose when developer Michael Meeks made a
series of blog posts about how Sun Microsystem’s control of
OpenOffice.org is supposedly stifling the development of a
community around the project…”