OpenOffice.org, the open source office suite, launched version 3.0 yesterday. The demand for the new version seems to have taken OpenOffice.org off guard because their website hasn’t been able to handle the load, as has been reported from several places around the Web.

In the meantime, OpenOffice.org has put up a simplified static page with download links, but even that hasn’t been enough to ensure the website’s stability. As of this writing, the website fails to load, though we managed to access it earlier to take the screenshot you see below.

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A benefit of open source software is the ability to take the code base of an application and develop it in a new direction. This is, as most of you probably know, called forking, and is very common in the open source community. For example, many Linux distributions can be traced back to either Debian, Fedora or Slackware.

Much of the open source software that is in popular use today was born from other projects. We thought it would be interesting to take a look at the history of some of these software forks and find out WHY they happened in the first place.

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