On Fri, Apr 15, 2011 at 10:33 PM, Louis Suarez-Potts <lui...@gmail.com>wrote:
> All, > As others have noted… well, this is interesting news.* And it comes as > news, indeed. It also comes unattached with any actual explication as to > what it means in practice. And there are many questions, and I've asked my > former colleagues some of them. The most obvious being, of course, Will > Oracle contribute code to the development of OpenOffice.org as it has in the > past? Right now, Oracle does virtually all of the coding for OpenOffice.org. > The resulting code is then worked on by competing projects—either to make it > more compatible with Microsoft Office, or to make it work with established > frameworks, or whatever. > > As of now, the code is mature and powerful; it is being used by tens of > millions and being adopted by even more every year. I am not concerned about > the present, for OpenOffice.org addresses present needs more than > adequately. > > I am, however, really interested in seeing what the future brings. And for > that, I think we, the OpenOffice.org community, need to be bold. I envision > a future where the tools for intellectual production are free, use open > standards that can be widely implemented, and that are not limited to this > or that environment but freely adaptable to a range of devices, mobile or > not. > > The anchor here is the ODF, the format that transcends any particular > implementation but which is only fully realized by the most comprehensive, > OpenOffice.org. And the tools, such as those making up OpenOffice.org, to > satisfy my vision, and the vision of the community, as I understand it, must > be free and open. > I agree althought as far as development there are some areas on the direction that would need to be reevaluated. At OOoCon 05 in Koper, the direction was to put extensions as the way to push community oriented developers out of the core. Something similar to what Mozilla did back then. There were also many issues regarding the spur of code that was pushed from 1.x to 2.x and there were many strong issues when managing branches and mantaining this new code. Barcelona came in 07 and some things have changed including the GSOC and there were the idea of sandboxing development, some projects like the Notes in Writer came to be out of this model. 08-09 came Go-OO as a legitimate fork of OOo and development model change in paralell to the one that OOo had. mantaining a separate code tree and doing some more fast development including some features on Calc and the whole Mono-OO bridge to achieve better compatibility with VBA and OOXML. 2010 came with LibreOffice split, and sucked a lot of the community, leaving the current OOo community in a very shocking hault. At least marketing and NLC have been diminished in traffic considerably. I am not sure how much of the contributions had slowed down (but could check the EIS reports). As for downloads I check the script and could see some slow down from the booming 2009-2010. So now with this sudden shakes we need to put some of these questions in the drawing board. How can the community advanced from this point. Lack of knowledge of the core code might be some issues, something that the Education project has tried to prevent by doing this sandbox development on core code and working even with Go-OO in 2010 to keep contributions to the core as well as mantaining other products like OOo4kids and OOolight making a community of it's own supported by mainly young developers that want to innovate in OOo. So in summary I will have to say that there should be a more formal position about the need to have a community based development core, that could hand down from the Oracle guys (Open Office Business Unit) and get some kind of training period so the community can take it from here. Unfortunately I am not sure if there is enough expertise on the current community to undertake this task. Going to other FLOSS communities like Debian, KDE could be something strategically could work, but then again this has been the goal from OOo since pretty much John was in charge of the Mktg project, and the success hasn't been clear. > Best, > Louis > > > > * > http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Oracle-Announces-Its-Intention-to-Move-OpenOfficeorg-to-a-Community-Based-Project-NASDAQ-ORCL-1428324.htm > > > ---- > > Louis Suarez-Potts, PhD > Community Manager > Chair, Community Council > OpenOffice.org > > > Blog: http://ooo-speak.blogspot.com/ > > -- *Alexandro Colorado* *OpenOffice.org* Español http://es.openoffice.org -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe send email to dev-unsubscr...@marketing.openoffice.org For additional commands send email to sy...@marketing.openoffice.org with Subject: help
