Legacy should never be a burden

This post will be short, but somewhat important. A couple of months after we started the Document Foundation and the LibreOffice project, a new sociological trend started to emerge inside our community. While it’s clear we were and are the continuation of the OpenOffice project judging both by the numbers of contributors who have switched from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice and by our manifesto itself, we also gained quite a few brand new people. I have the feeling that at least for some of them, they do not identify well with the notion that we are continuing some other project but would rather think of LibreOffice as something brand new (irrelevant of any technological arguments). I would like to share my perception on this.

True, the Document Foundation and the LibreOffice project have the goal to further and secure the development of the OpenOffice.org project. But we also believe we should go beyond that and that’s why we welcome everyone interested in contributing, not just specific people we know. But you hardly never start with nothing. Our base is the OpenOffice.org community, with its history, its common knowledge and habits. Sometimes these habits need to be modified or even abandoned, sometimes, they reflect the result of years and years of community experience. But in any case, we are not looking backwards; we are looking forward knowing that what we are creating is fundamentally the right thing to do. Everybody, whether old-timer of the OpenOffice.org project or newcomer should feel at home within the LibreOffice project. Legacy should inspire us to reach beyond its past success and should never be a burden. And if I have not told you so before: Welcome to the LibreOffice Project. Let’s build something exciting!