History
The ooo-build patchset was started at Ximian, before that company was bought by Novell. This was originally because Sun were slow to accept outside patches to OpenOffice.org, even from corporate partners.
Since the end of 2007, various Linux distributions, including SUSE in its various forms, Debian and Ubuntu, had cooperated in maintaining a large set of patches to the upstream OpenOffice.org that for various technical or bureaucratic reasons have not been accepted or not even submitted upstream. Some of the companies behind those distributions have also offered Windows builds of OpenOffice.org offering the same enhancements compared to the upstream build. Windows builds include, for example, OxygenOffice Professional and OpenOffice.org Novell Edition. Go-oo is just a more concentrated branding effort for these patches and patched builds of OpenOffice.org.
Michael Meeks, from Novell, (who also works on OpenOffice.org and GNOME), said that the differentiation was done because Sun Microsystems wanted to preserve the right to offer its own version (StarOffice) and even sell the development to the proprietary software market, like Lotus Symphony from IBM. Sun was accused of not accepting contributions from the community.
Read more about this topic: Go-oo
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