The Party, the Crash, and the 3.0

Now it’s been days, and more than a week I haven’t blogged. The reason is simple: I was swamped. But I ended up exhausted and happy.

We’ve been releasing the 3.0. Yes, we did it, and we also threw a major party at the headquarters of the Region Île de France. Pictures are available here, at least for the sets I’ve seen. It was brilliant, beautiful, and achieved the rare and deeply useful task of being both sophisticated and convivial. As a result, more than 400 people flocked in the gates of the room, a good 50 of them having standing on the sidewalks half an hour before. The Region’s President, who couldn’t make it at the last moment, sent his deputy who delivered a great speech. Then Louis Suarez-Potts gave a wonderful and thought provoking speech about Free Software, OpenOffice.org, and the world as it goes, emphasizing the need for freedom bound with fraternity as a way out of the current global crisis. I then had to speak, thanking many in the community, and describing the intense activity of native-language and localization teams busy releasing the 3.0 in their own language. I forgot many, managed to quote four countries (Laos, Burma, Brazil and South Africa) and one river (the Ganges river) but didn’t forgot the French community. I also announced the main new features for the 3.0: I was surprized people hadn’t heard about most of them.

The party went on well, and while we were drinking wine and eating some very nice meals the OpenOffice.org web site was down. Actually, it’s still more or less down and some emergecy workarounds have been designed in order to whistand the huge workload stemming from the massive download requests on the servers. Meanwhile, the migration of the development infrastructure to Subversion has been completed.

So aside the web site crash and the credit crunch, what’s left to say? The end of 2008 and 2009 will be a time for major growth for OpenOffice.org . Download numbers are up exponentially, and the press is very positive about us. Heck, I even got interview in the digital version of Liberation, the largest French newspaper. Articles and reviews are provided below. I would like to conclude today’s post by thanking everyone who contributed to this release and everyone who downloaded, is downloading and will download OpenOffice.org 3.0 . My apologies for the crash and glitches!