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Comment by fhdkweig

10 hours ago

If LibreOffice ceases to exist, won't the old installers still work? Is it forkable to a new project? I seem to remember that it was Star Office then Open Office then LibreOffice.

I think such situations are rather big risk that a community that already wasn't very active atrophies or splits and then atrophies. With code bases like that there's also a lot of maintenance so being able to run an old version is not necessarily enough.

  • Yeah that ability to use old code is great as an emergency escape hatch but it's not really a viable day-to-day document editing strategy.

  • What maintenance are you talking about? I'm quite sure I could open any document on my computer with a libreoffice version from ten years ago. The functionality doesn't magically rot away...

The questionnis: How does a community form, which can take a project tof that size? TDF andjvre Office cMd out of a long process of independent (from Sun Microsystems) contributions to OpenOffice, which at some point had a momentum to do a proper form and then another momentum to take over as the lead variant.

For a successful fork you need a notable amount of people engaging in the fork.