The Most Terrifying Tech Acquisition in History

When Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems in 2010, developers feared for the future of OpenOffice. The open source community responded by forking it — creating LibreOffice under the Document Foundation. Oracle attempted to push out contributors but failed, eventually donating OpenOffice to the Apache Foundation in 2011. LibreOffice went on to thrive, now installed on millions of computers including government systems, while OpenOffice stagnated. The story illustrates a key advantage of open source: the ability to fork and walk away with the code when corporate interests threaten a project.