Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by binarycrusader 4723 days ago
The accepted definition of a software fork is a copy of an existing project that is independently developed.

Therefore, LibreOffice is a fork:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_(software_development)

It doesn't matter which people do or do not work on the project at this point. The original owners of OpenOffice donated the project to the Apache foundation (under less restrictive licensing terms I might add).

So at this point, it doesn't matter what happened to the project in the past, OpenOffice is now an Apache project owned by the Apache foundation.

TL;DR: The OpenOffice project (now part of the Apache Software Foundation) announced the second release candidate for the soon to be released OpenOffice 4.0.

1 comments

> The accepted definition of a software fork is a copy of > an existing project that is independently developed. > ... > It doesn't matter which people do or do not work on the > project at this point

Surely if the definition is "independently developed", then which people are developing it is the only thing that matters?

The independently developed (in my mind) is not referring to the people developing it, but rather the fact that the new copy is developed independently of the old project.

As an example, you can have the same set of developers on a new project, but as long as it's a copy of an old project, most people still expect that to be called a fork since the development of that copy is independent of the original.