” Someone wrote a long time ago that a fork was not necessarily
a bad thing. Indeed, it is certainly one of the most vivid
expressions of the freedom Free and Open Source software carries.
On the second of October, a much mediated engineer of
OpenOffice.org and long time contributor of the OpenOffice.org
project, announced that Novell would host and distribute custom
builds of Openoffice.org without the JCA. What’s interesting here
is that many people would not have paid attention to this news if
the press article reporting it had not carried a headline
explicitly stating, ‘Sun refuses the LGPL, Novell forks.’“To this widely spread but utterly inaccurate assertion, two
things should be said in response. First, OpenOffice.org *is*
released under the LGPL. Second, and perhaps more interestingly,
Novell did not deny that it was forking, aside from Michael Meeks
trying to nuance and to minimize this claim…”