Linux.com

Paula Rooney has written an excellent article on a dispute in the Open Office developer community that could possibly lead to a fork of the free office suite. A fork occurs when someone puts out their own version of a piece of software that is separate from the “mainline” or “generally accepted as official” version. The dividing issue in the case of Open Office is the contributor agreement that Sun requires all developers to sign before any code they create can become a part of the project. Somebody didn’t want to sign it, and the disagreement escalated to the point that a fork is being considered.