Opinion: how forks could (and should!) cooperate with the mainstream?
OpenOffice.org project has several
forks or derived works, if you
want to. I was asked privately how do I want forks to cooperate with the mainstream
OpenOffice.org. Here is my opinion.
Maintainers of forks do very hard work maintaining their patches/sources in separate CVS/other SCM
systems and track both the development of OpenOffice.org and also their own developments containing
their specific features and enhancements.
Sun is using the same
mechanism to work on their
StarOffice,
Planamesa is using the same mechanism to work on
NeoOffice, some (many, in fact) GNU/Linux
vendors are closely cooperating on
ooo-build etc.
They can save a lot of work on their side (and on our side and all other forks' side as well) by
closely cooperating with the mainstream and isolating the changes they need to get their stuff
working and submitting the generic changes back to the mainstream and even working on their proper
integration. This brings them not only much easier work in the future, better human relationship
with the mainstream developers, but also
community respect!
I more than welcome the recent change in ooo-build. They accept patches to the code only if the
issue has its OpenOffice.org IssueZilla ID assigned. Of course it is not acceptable for all forks
and all enhancements (imagine issues like "StarOffice: Prepare UI theme for NASA" or "Remove
Patrick's brutal Java hack in dtrans" visible for all) but this is a way to go with general
changes. Unfortunately all forks have (sometimes) problems with identifying what is special change
and what can be used also by other forks/mainstream. But we have to live with that.
We can't force forks to work with us closely because we have chosen GNU LGPL as our license. But we
can ask them to be polite and submit issues with fixes back to us and we can offer
community
respect to them.