Chinese OS and software ecosystem

SanWenYu said:

I have said that anyone can create their own forks if he can afford it and are willing to spend the time and money. But it goes back to my point that the time and money add up as the cost of the fork that could have been spent on something else. Maybe that is one of the goals of the export bans. In other words, the US government might just wish that the export bans can kill you. If not, hurt you, or at the least slow you down.

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SanWenYu said:

No doubt and no dispute that forking is the strength of open source. But how many of these forks you mentioned are still active and considered successful? Not that many. And how many such forks are developed completely isolated from the origin? Probably even fewer.

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vincent said:

off the top of my head: LibreOffice, Libreelec

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vincent said:

I hope you know even if you fork a port, you can still copy over whatever updates made to the original project as long as the original project remains open source, and add your own updates to the port.

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SanWenYu said:

IIRC LibreOffice is kind of like MariaDB. Its predecessor, OpenOffice, ceased to exist somehow (or the project imploded or something like that). LibreOffice was then created to be the new home for the developers. It's not a typical case in forking. Some probably even wouldn't want to call it a fork.

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vincent said:

off the top of my head: LibreOffice, Libreelec

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Overbom said:

I am unfortunate enough that I have to use LibreOffice in my job. Suffice to say, garbage is too good of a word to describe it

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pevade said:

Whats wrong with LibreOffice?

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Overbom said:

I am unfortunate enough that I have to use LibreOffice in my job. Suffice to say, garbage is too good of a word to describe it

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Overbom said:

It does the very basics good enough. Anything other than that is causing more headache to the user.

Just one example, if you use remote terminals to access your worskpace's files. Libreoffice has some well known bugs on remote opening files which it refuses to fixes, which cause the LibreOffice suite to crash and refuse to start. Imagine suddenly becoming unable to open any kind of Word, Excel etc document. Now imagine a 500-1000 company all using Libre Office...

Legions of people have reported this, among many others, bug but are still stuck waiting for years already for when it will be fixed.

Contrast that to Microsoft Office, which although is not perfect, at least because it is a paid/subscription product Microsoft has a vested interest to fix critical bugs.

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pevade said:

Which version of LibreOffice are you using?

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