Okay, I think I understand now about forks. This is just one of those things that is probably specific to open source that I wouldn't have seen before, being in Windows. Thank you for that explanation.
I did go looking for LibreOffice, but if it's in my Software/Package Manager I can't find it. I did locate a download location online somewhere, but even the Debian version is in "tar" format, which I've had no luck with. Plus, Cricket has slowed down my connection speeds (I'm probably way over my bandwidth for this month), so I'm really limited in what I can download until I change ISPs - which will hopefully be sometime next week. (I ordered new service a couple of hours ago.)
I think I'm just going to play around a bit with OpenOffice and see if I can get it to do what I want. One of the links that Joan mentioned was for a tutorial site, and that looks promising (meaning it seems understandable).
I thank everyone for their suggestions. If I can get OpenOffice Base working I'll let you all know.
Meg
--- In LINUX_Newbies@yahoogroups.com, Cameron Simpson <cs@...> wrote:
>
> On 10Mar2011 03:15, Meg <kimada.news@...> wrote:
> | And what is a fork?
>
> The source code for various tools (eg mysql etc) is openly available.
> For the mainstream larger tools there will usually be a core group of
> people who look after the "master" copy of the course, and who thus
> release the "official" version of the tool. Everyone can have access to
> the source and can submit changes, but the accepted changes will go
> through some central team who keep things sane (QAing changes, rejecting
> unwanted changes etc). So as far as outsiders are concenred there is
> still one tool.
>
> However, sometimes the community have significant disagreements about
> how the main team runs things; control issues or design issues or
> different (conflicting) plans for what will happen in the future.
>
> Sometimes these disagreements cause a new team to take the current
> version of the code and proceed with development in their own direction;
> depending on the nature of the disagreement this may or may not result
> in two teams sharing changes with eeach other in the future.
>
> Anyway, now there are two teams, working on two copies of the source
> code. This branch in the tree of development is called a fork.
>
> Oracle bought MySQL a year or so ago and some of the community do not
> trust Oracle to continue MySQL development in a desirable fashion (since
> of course MySQL is a competitor for Oracles core db product). So the
> code is being forked, and developed by another team.
>
> Likewise with OpenOffice, LibreOffice is a fork of the main product.
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