IMHO, neither the continued KOffice (as opposed to Calligra) nor Apache OO are useful projects. The community (which includes the distributors) has decided for Calligra and LibreOffice, respectively.

In any case, the most sophisticated attacks come from IBM people, and they are directed more to TDF than to GPL (being GPL a way to attack TDF).

Sam Ruby: http://intertwingly.net/blog/2011/06/01/Apache-OpenOffice (being a founding member of TDF, I find this rant as personally offensive).

Rob Weir (please read the comments, because some of the worst attacks are in the comments): http://www.robweir.com/blog/2011/06/apache-openoffice.html, http://www.robweir.com/blog/2011/06/openoffice-libreoffice-and-the-scarcity-fallacy.html, http://www.robweir.com/blog/2012/02/ending-the-symphony-fork.html, http://www.robweir.com/blog/2012/04/free-software-marketing-community-metrics.html (this is directed to me, and is full of FUD, nonsense and wrong information, but this is the style of the guy).

Arnaud le Hors: http://lehors.wordpress.com/2012/02/03/libreoffice-should-declare-victory-and-rejoin-openoffice/ (another offensive post, as seen from a TDF founder POV).

The ooo-dev mailing list is full of messages against everything, and especially TDF. As an example, you can look at this thread about our relicensing efforts (please separate true ASF people from AOO people, who are there just because AOO is a way to go against TDF and LibreOffice): http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-ooo-dev/201205.mbox/browser

@john: Or even better, can you point out such an example?

Because the Firefox development team has no interest in making their Gecko rendering engine easily reusable by other projects. They like to keep it tightly intertwined with the Firefox browser itself, and also not care about backwards compatibility etc.
And that’s perfectly fine, it’s their choice.

However, there is is big need for an open-source modular web browser framework / rendering engine (with front-ends for different programming languages and toolkits) that can be used to bring HTML/web viewing capabilities to all kinds of desktop and mobile applications.

That’s where WebKit comes in.

For a list of some of the apps that use it, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit#Use

Does it NEED to be forked then? We have Linux Kernel for example, and no one ever thinks of forking it, since the kernel does it job already and no one wants to waste the time on reinventing the wheel. And if the software is too monolithic, it will likely to eventually be refactored or to collapse on itself.

slangkamp: Domination isn’t generally ok if a project is open source e.g. my example with the browsers. If Firefox was so dominating that no other browsers would be developed, there might be no WebKit.

Why would we need WebKit anyway?

Unless the dominating software is so big, monolithic and complicated that nobody can easily fork it. If you have a project on this scale, you already need a very big team to fork it. Also smaller projects have trouble to find users and developers as everybody strives for the big popular ones.

Domination isn’t generally ok if a project is open source e.g. my example with the browsers. If Firefox was so dominating that no other browsers would be developed, there might be no WebKit.

Diversity is rare in proprietary world only because it’s blocked by copyright, vendor lock-in and patent threats. If the dominating thing is free software, diversity WILL happen, sooner or later. Besides, even if it doesn’t happen, it’s OK, since the dominating thing is free and people can modify it as they wish.

And the goal is to gather enough influence on proprietary hardware and software developers so they have monetary incentive not to block free software from running.

Considering users accept Windows 8′s ability to remove programs, it’s very unlikely that they want openness. They only want access to Facebook.