Moin Moin [1],
my name is Christian Lippka and I work on the donnated code base since 1998
when I was hired by StarDivision which was then consumed by Sun and later
bought by Oracle. Oracle is also my current employer. I am here as an
individual,
so everything I do and say is based on my own opinions and motivations.
Please
note that I can not and will not discuss decisions made by Sun/Oracle
now or in the
past. I also obviously do not speak for Oracle in any way and I'm not in
any way
involved in the donation process that is currently going on.
That said, my past work was to lead the Sun/Oracle internal development
of the
Impress and Draw application. My work includes
- the creation of the flash export
- the down stripping of code to create the (discontinued before open
sourcing) stand alone StarOffice Impress Player
- the specification of the presentation and graphic parts of the
OpenOffice.org xml format which later became the base for ODF
- driving development of the UNO API for impress and draw so it is now
possible to have an xml filter for impress that does not link to the
application code
- adding native table support to impress and draw
- bootstrapping the graphics part of the native mac port by fixing open
issues in the vcl sal layer for aqua (spare time project)
- working on the renaissance project to modernize the overal UI
experience of impress
At heard I'm a C/C++ hacker but I nowadays often use Java for small
private projects out of convenience and
I started to get some experience in Objectice-c. I am not an idealist at
all, I tend to use the tool that does the job at hand best.
This makes me currently a desktop user of a windows pc, an ubuntu box
and a lovely old mac pro.
As someone coming originally from the hardware world I still have a huge
interest in embedded and mobile and would
love to see an OOo derivate on a tablet.
My personal motivation to join this proposal as a committer is based on
my bounding with the underlying source code and
also the people involved. You can not work 12 years on the same thing
without getting to either hate or love it. So for me
it is obviously love and passion and it would make me sad to not even
try to make this proposal a success.
Now a valid question could be, why ASF and not TDF. For me, this is not
a binary question. I have already contributed
to OpenOffice.org in my spare time. I have also already (though small)
contributed to LibreOffice in my spare time.
While I have some different opinions, I do not oppose the TDF or
LibreOffice. I am not here to make this project win
and another project fail. I am not here to dishonor the good work that
good people put into something that they
think is the best way to go. But I hope that people will respect others
for trying to do something different, even
so we may share many of the same goals.
I'm happy with healthy competition. Not competition in the sense that
the same work needs to be done multiple
times. But competition in the sense to try different things, provide
diversity and something to choose from.
At least this is my understanding of liberty, the freedom to be able to
choose from different options. If there
is only one option to choose from, even if this is the perfect option,
this is still no longer freedom.
My opinion on the split/unite community is very simple. For me, there is
but one open office community.
If you are working on any branch, fork, clone, sibling,
successor,predecessor of what is OpenOffice.org, you
are part of that community. If you are a teacher at a school and promote
the use of any odf based office
suite, you are part of this community. If you hate to see a world where
there is only one vendor dominating
something that is essential for everyone in the digital age, you are
part of the community.
And yet, inside this community there are other communities, formed
around goals, opinions, motivations.
And I think that is perfectly valid.
I also think that while it is hard some times it is a good thing that
this heats up so much emotions. This shows
that OpenOffice.org did not just start something that is useful. It
started something that people are passionate
about. And this makes me so exited to be part of it.
My technical vision (as in, not plans, no facts, no "I tell you how to
do it") for this particular project under the umbrella
of the ASF is as follows. I see this as an opportunity to do some bold
moves that will jumpstart the free office world to
the next level. One such bold move in the past was the switch to XML. I
think this changed everything, and I usually hate such
marketing speech :) What I would love to see is a major rework
concerning modularization and configurability.
In the past I was part of many discussions on what would be the best UI
framework for OpenOffice.org to solve all
problems including world peace. Obviously there was no such thing. This
is even more true in the world we live
in now. There is not only the desktop any more, my smartphone is faster
than my first development pc at StarDivision.
My android tablet has a bigger screen resolution than my first VGA
monitor. To serve this diverse market of target
devices and different input idioms there can not only be one user
interface, there must be many.
Also it would be cool to target different groups of users by providing a
user interface that is optimized for a
special task or need. See OOo4Kids as a great example.
I'm not a native speaker but I tried hard to look up every more
complicated word in the dictionary to check for
possible misreadings. If you still find something that you have a grudge
with or find offensive, please just blame
it on a communication issue.
Best regards,
Christian
[1] http://moinmo.in/MoinMoinEtymology
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