Go-oo

» see go-oo.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Go-oo started in 2003 as ooo-build, a set of patches that the Linux company Ximian kept on top of OpenOffice.org, led by Michael Meeks. Patches, at first, because Sun controlled OpenOffice.org and required copyright assignment from contributors, which made getting work upstream slow enough that maintaining your own stack of fixes was the faster road. In October 2007 the patch set stopped pretending to be a patch set and was released as an independent fork under the name Go-oo, short for Go-Open Office, with Novell behind it.

What mattered about a free office suite in Turkey around then was narrower than what the mailing lists argued about. I was at university, on TTNet broadband by 2006, and the only real question anyone asked of an alternative to Microsoft Office was whether it would open the .doc a professor had sent and print it without the layout coming apart. Turkey even had a state-funded Linux distribution in those years. The suite underneath it was not something most people could have named.

Go-oo answered that question better than upstream did, which was the entire reason it existed. It carried import filters for Microsoft's OOXML formats with limited write support, and it handled the old Microsoft binary formats more reliably than upstream did. It would open a Microsoft Works file, which almost nothing else would. If your spreadsheets leaned on Excel VBA macros, Go-oo gave you the closest thing to working behavior available in free software at the time. Builds usually appeared a couple of days after the matching OpenOffice.org stable release.

~ the record ~

~ the argument against it ~

Not everyone in free software was pleased. The complaint was that Go-oo had pulled Microsoft technology inside the tent, with its OOXML and VBA support, and that it leaned on Mono, which Novell controlled. The worry was patents: code written to read Microsoft's formats using a runtime owned by the company with the Microsoft patent covenant looked, to a certain kind of reader, like a liability being shipped by default. It was still being argued over when the project ended.

~ the fork that ended it ~

In September 2010 The Document Foundation announced LibreOffice, a full fork of OpenOffice.org rather than a patch stack on top of it. Many of the Go-oo developers and a large part of the Go-oo code went into the new project at its founding, which is why LibreOffice shipped useful on day one instead of spending a year catching up. Go-oo's last release, 3.2.1, had come out on 21 July 2010, about ten weeks earlier. No further release followed it.

LibreOffice and its enterprise descendant Collabora Online are the places that codebase ended up. Meeks is still working on it.

~ the page that is still up ~

go-oo.org answers today, sixteen years on, serving the same thin stylesheet and the same layout. The headline has been edited to read "LibreOffice is now Better, Faster, Free-er", and under it sits the line "Go-oo is obsoleted by LibreOffice", followed by a short paragraph explaining that The Document Foundation gave the developers the right home and that "the go-oo project has been dis-continued in favour of LibreOffice". The hyphen in dis-continued is in the original, and so is a stray apostrophe a sentence earlier. Scroll past the notice and the old sales pitch is intact underneath, still telling you about Microsoft Works import and VBA fidelity in the present tense.

The Wayback captures put a date range on the edit rather than a day. The homepage was still carrying the plain Go-oo pitch with no notice at all in late January 2011, and by August 2011 the discontinuation text was there. Somebody came back to a finished project most of a year after it ended, to tell whoever arrived next where everyone had gone.

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