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Comment by seanhunter | Hacker News Reader

Surely if you don't like a project rather than writing open letters and whatnot, you fork it? That's the whole point of open source.

That's how gcc project governance got fixed - egcs forked and made the improvements they wanted, won the argument and basically became the main branch. Some of the history is here https://softpanorama.org/People/Stallman/history_of_gcc_deve...

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I mean, this happened a long long time ago. LibreOffice inherited approximately 100% of developer effort.

The problem is that Apache is effectively lying about OpenOffice still being a thing, and trapping less-savvy users who aren't aware of this context into an office suite frozen in time in 2014.

Another part of the problem is that the "OpenOffice" brand is still strong. Lot of people continue to talk about OpenOffice and look for it on Google.

Oracle just managed to kill a strong FLOSS brand. But, in some way, the LibreOffice fork energized the community.

For the record, Oracle didn't kill OO on purpose, they just fumbled with it. Despite what they might have pretended in sales demo at the time, they've never been in the business of building office suites, let alone opensource ones, so they didn't really know how to deal with it. In the end they even did the right thing, by passing it on to Apache, when they could have just quietly strangled it in a basement.

Ironically, one of the most anti-Microsoft companies ever unwittingly managed to do Microsoft a massive favour.

OpenOffice is a great name, LibreOffice is a pretty bad one. I think <Name>Office is just too bound to the OpenOffice brand at this point.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ StarOffice was a fine name…

>> He stared writing the compiler being almost thirty years old. That means at the time when his programming abilities started to decline.

What is that supposed to mean?!

The charitable interpretation is that it applies to RMS and RMS only, and the author has some knowledge of an objectively measurable decline in his programming skills.

The more general interpretation is that the author of that page is egregiously ageist.

I, too, resemble that remark.

Probably a sardonic reference to Mark Zuckerberg: https://venturebeat.com/business/start-up-advice-for-entrepr...

>“I want to stress the importance of being young and technical,” he stated. If you want to found a successful company, you should only hire young people with technical expertise. “Young people are just smarter,” he said with a straight face.

In fairness to Zuckerberg, he was only 22 when he said that; it's kind of typical youthful hubris that many of us probably had to some degree. I'm fairly certain current 39-year old Zuckerberg would think it's a load of bollocks.

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