Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami
Look at OpenOffice. At some point, when Oracle started to jack around with it, it was forked into LibreOffice, which has now become the de facto default.
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Truth to be told, Apple has not only managed not to kill CUPS, but used that project to exercise a bit of a control over the rest of Open Source world. When they decided to go "Bonjour/zeroconf only" and drop the CUPS browsing, there was a fuss in the OSS world, but the we adapted and Avahi was fixed. Apple dropped the CUPS filters that are not of interest for them, they were picked up. In seven years of ownership, CUPS gradually and slowly became the pure Apple property, the middleware that is open sourced to ease the maintenance, but steered where Apple wants it to go. No forks.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami
Selling Calibre to one of the big e-book sellers is probably only good for Kovid's purse, but it would be a detriment to open source software and e-reading in general.
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I beg to disagree.
What successful takeovers of the open source packages have shown to be the tendency is that the development work becomes funded, albeit steered toward the functionality of interest for the new owner. A drastic and abrupt measures would fracture the community and force a fork, the outcome that is not desirable (OpenOffice) for the new owner.
At the worst case, we will endure a transition to the fork, and lose a developer or two in the process. What is good for Kovid's purse is good for Calibre and, in extension, for its users.