Except that's not true. Open source _is_ about marketing and mindshare and brandnames and winners and losers, for a variety of reasons.<p>The primary one that the LibreOffice folks complain about (and I agree with, as someone completely uninvolved with both projects) is that a lot of mindshare was built up over the last several years for the name "open office", and your average _end user_ is going to remember that and not have heard about the fork, and certainly not going to have any opinion as to who's right. Both groups, I'd assume, want end users to have the best product. So the LibreOffice folks can justifiably complain that if Apache OpenOffice is using the "open office" name but not releasing the best product, they're doing users a disservice.<p>More than that is that the LibreOffice folks contributed to that mindshare. I'd bet a good fraction of Windows and Mac users know of OpenOfffice.org because their Linux-using friends recommended it, but all major Linux distros had for years been collaborating on patches via <a href="http://go-oo.org/" rel="nofollow">http://go-oo.org/</a>. That community turned into the LibreOffice community and started marketing. They had _tried_ collaborating and sharing the name, but decided that didn't work out. (In fact, if you look at <a href="http://go-oo.org/" rel="nofollow">http://go-oo.org/</a> , one noticeable feature of the site is how little marketing they were doing. The creation of LibreOffice/The Document Foundation was a considered decision based on years of experience of attempting to focus on software alone.)<p>Even if you put aside the end users and pretend that writing open-source software is worth it just to produce the software, mindshare and marketing still comes into play when attracting contributors and doing releases. I've never contributed to either, but if I were to, it's my impression that LibreOffice is doing better and that the community there is more vibrant, and so that's what I'll prefer to participate in. If that impression changes and I gather that LibreOffice is dying, I'll work on Apache OpenOffice. So I trust both organizations to tell me how well they're doing and not misrepresent the other as doing worse than it is.<p>Finally, all the major free software projects -- Firefox, Linux, Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, etc. -- aggressively protect their name and their trademark, because brand identity is important both for users and for contributors. Even GNU releases its licenses and philosophies under a no-modifications copyright license. There's no reason the office suites should be different, and not protect their identities and image.<p>I would be as happy as anyone to see the fork resolved, but I don't think it can be done by telling people to focus on writing code and not focus on things essential to the process of collaborating on code, releasing a product, and getting users -- all the reasons to write code in the first place.