Hi,
my name is Malte Timmermann, and I work on the code base of
OpenOffice.org since 1991 - almost from the beginning.
It started with StarDivision, later acquired by Sun, later acquired by
Oracle. While still being an Oracle employee, my engagement here will be
on an individual base.
Among the many things that I have implemented for OOo are the first
version of the multi-platform Help System and compiler (and designing
the XML version later), the Basic IDE, different widgets and remote
support for VCL, the UNO AWT Toolkit and Uno Controls with MVC
separation for using them in multi-view documents, and parts of the XML
digital signatures.
My biggest contribution probably was the EditEngine, which is used for
text IO in Calc, Impress and the Drawing objects.
When starting this, I was told to create some "lightweight" editor for
Impress - and it ended up with a huge beast capable of many text
processing features, including all the stuff you need for vertical and
right-to-left writing, rotated text and text flow in a polygon.
Later I became responsible for the project to make OpenOffice.org
accessible, which was really challenging because of OOo's own GUI
toolkit and because of all existing Accessibility APIs not being
complete enough for exposing complex document content.
So I spent a lot of time in designing the Uno Accessibility API (which
later was used by IBM as the starting point for IAccessible2), and with
having many discussions with people from JAA, ATK and with different AT
projects and vendors.
I still work in the area of Accessibility, be it for the OpenOffice.org
application, or for ODF. I am a member of the OASIS ODF TC and it's
Accessibility SC.
When in 2006 the first security issues with OOo have been reported, I
got the job to take care for StarOffice and OOo security and the
handling of security issues. I have initiated the OOo Security Team,
where people could report vulnerabilities to, and where people from
different Linux distros are members so that we could together work on
fixing the issues and coordinating release dates.
Unfortunately, even working as a technical architect for StarOffice/OOo
since 2003, I was only able to influence newly developed stuff, but not
to make bigger changes to the existing code base - mainly because of
resource and time restrictions.
There are many things that should be changed. One of the things I have
in mind would make it much easier for other projects or products to make
use of the different OOo editors inside other applications or GUI
technologies. Since this should be very interesting for commercial
products like Lotus Symphony or RedOffice, maybe we can find time and
resources for this now (once we have solved the more important issues to
get Apache OOo running at all). But it will be a quite big task...
It's now time for the next decade of OOo. After a decade of closed
source StarOffice, and a decade of copyleft OpenOffice.org, it's now
time for many decades of Apache OpenOffice(.org), where many individuals
and companies can cooperate together, all having the same rights to make
use of the code in other open source projects as well as in closed
source products.
And you can bet - after working on this thing almost half of my life
now, I want to see Apache OpenOffice(.org) becoming a big success!
Malte.
PS: I just managed to catch up all the emails on this list, and summed
it up in my blog at http://blogs.oracle.com/malte/
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