Thanks to the patches developed by Novell for Go-OO, NeoOffice was the first native Mac application that supported OpenXML. The fork was founded because the previous CEO of Sun refused to support anything related to Mac OS.

How long before we see a third OpenOffice “distribution”? Novell developed VBA support long ago but Sun (for whatever reason) refused to include it.įor that reason many Linux distributions ship Novell’s OpenOffice - including Ubuntu. Instead of contributing to the codebase, Novell is making its own. At least on of these talks about openness and freedom, while signing contracts with on of the biggest enemys of this very freedom. While better interoperability is always a good thing, the question remains unanswered what parts/developments of OpenOffice went missing in Go-OO for this.Īs an individual developer, wether you work on OpenOffice or on Go-OO, you just get involved into a fight between some big software companies. It is also obvious what the main goals of Novell are with this software suite: strengthening the relationship with Microsoft (while effectively weakening ODF) on several fronts. This is not the expected behaviour of a good free software citizen. Then they do press work like this, talking bad about OpenOffice while promoting their fork. Instead they list individual employees as the developers of the project. I don’t like this project just for the reason you pointed out: It is obvious that it is ran by Novell but they don’t openly admit it.

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