Commercial Company – Gerrit 502

The Document Foundation (TDF) uses Gerrit for the code review of LibreOffice. You can also clone the source code from there (and submit it). Thanks to the admin team of TDF the Gerrit instance is always up and running.

A commercial company created a fork of LibreOffice at April,1. It started it’s own Gerrit instance, but seemed to not employ a capable admin team for it’s infrastructure. Because of that you continous outage of the infrastructure of the company and Gerrit respctively nginx sends a error message 502 ‚Bad Gateway‘.

This makes it obvious that running a software project only with developers isn’t flying. There is much more needed for a succesful project, e.g. a capable infrastructure team.

And for a successful office software project you need among other things e.g. people working on localization and documentation, helping users and run the marketing of the software in as much as possible countries (speaking the regional language).

Chicanery in FLOSS

It’s really impressive how much effort a company, which contextalize itself in the FLOSS world, make to put stones in the way of other members of the FLOSS world. Instead of working for the public good and join efforts they spent ressources on renaming files etc. from the upstream project they forked the source code away.

And in addition to that every file get a new header with the pointer that they belong to the new project.