OK. So, we have the original (1) StarOffice that used to have a fee associated with it but can now be downloaded free as part of the Google Pack. Then, SUN bought StarOffice in 1999 and later forked (2) OpenOffice.org. That was great. Lacking a Mac OS X native interface version, the much needed (3) NeoOffice fork was spawned to let Mac users have a version of OpenOffice that didn't require X11. Recently, IBM produced its own fork and inexplicably used the old Lotus (4) Symphony name taken from a 22 year old failed MS-DOS product. And, now, we have Novell's Michael Meeks creating yet another fork called either (5) Go-oo or Your OpenOffice.org (I'm not clear which it is or if this is an official Novell project or a personal project of Mr. Meeks.

The site's Discover section lists the features that differentiates it from its parent OpenOffice.org. This includes VBA (Visual Basic for Applications from Microsoft) macro compatibility, Microsoft Works file import, and faster startup. This is all good stuff.

But, does the world really need five OpenOffice forks? This reminds me too much of the UNIX situation back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Remember AT&T Unix System V, DEC Ultrix, HP-UX, IBM AIX, Solaris, SCO UNIX (cough cough cough) and other UNIXes? IMHO competition is good but fragmentation is bad. And, OpenOffice looks very fragmented at the moment.