Today I would like to discuss one topic which may be regarded by some as somewhat futile, and in a sense it is: the legacy of OpenOffice.org . But these past days I have noticed blogs and mailing list threads as well as discussions on social networks that the leaders of the Apache OpenOffice project (incubating) are having a filiation problem. I would like to address this, because while I think it’s better not to feed trolls, I think this is a deep issue as it pertains to the very identity and the raison d’être of the Apache OpenOffice project (incubating).

I cannot pinpoint accurately what caused to inflate the whole issue, but it seems that some  at Apache OpenOffice (incubating) would like to stress that there are the rightful continuation of the now defunct OpenOffice.org project, to the point of showing outright hostility to LibreOffice. They base their claims upon the following elements:

• they own the OpenOffice.org domain name
• they own the trademark of OpenOffice.org
• they must be the right heirs of OpenOffice.org since the Apache incubating project they’re contributing to was born out of the will of the copyright holder (Oracle) through its donation to the Apache Software Foundation.

These three points above are of course accurate. Do these make Apache OpenOffice (incubating) the “rightful” heir and continuation of OpenOffice.org ? Well, the real answer, I think, amounts to a marketing problem. If we solve this particular marketing problem, we will in fact be able to address the psychological side of the issue, the “who am I and why do I contribute to Apache OpenOffice (incubating)?” question. It might be weird to answer such an issue through a marketing perspective, but as we’re considering FOSS development projects, trademarks and corporations, it does make real sense.

The way the Apache OpenOffice (incubating) project was formed is in fact rather simple. Oracle, out of boredom and because of its shareholders’ greed, did dump the trademark of OpenOffice.org (and its attributes, such as domain names) over to Apache Software Foundation, and set up a specific software grant to the same entity, so that the code would be properly relicensed under the Apache Software Foundation’s policies. Oracle did not transfer its assets over to the Document Foundation. I am not so sure about Oracle’s initial thinking on this, although it seemed to have acted the same way with Jenkins.  In essence, what happened when the assets of the OpenOffice.org project were donated to Apache was just that. Assets got transferred, and it seems IBM felt they had acquired a good trademark. IBM was publicly vocal about the transfer and seemed to regard it as a very good thing.  This is essentially what prompts some inside the Apache OpenOffice (incubating) project to claim they are the continuation of OpenOffice.org . Let’s deal with this assertion marketing-wise first by taking another example.

Let’s imagine a case where the Boeing company acquires the Sukhoi aircraft corporation. Sukhoi gets merged and integrated inside a new entity or division of Boeing called “Boeing-Sukhoi” and sells whatever new aircrafts will be designed by the division or even by Boeing  itself. Now the real question the customers of Boeing and Sukhoi will care about (that would be, in this case, airlines) will be the maintenance of the existing Sukhoi aircrafts, the ones that have been designed and manufactured prior to the merger or the acquisition. In some cases (just like in the aerospace industry) the maintenance of existing products will be provided for a long period of time. Sometimes though, it’s just not the case; it depends of the industry practices and the business agreement.

Let us now go back to Apache OpenOffice (incubating) and OpenOffice.org . The real question users really care about is the future of OpenOffice.org . The Document Foundation has shown to everyone that we were ready from day one to give the OpenOffice.org project a future, and a bright one. But if we stick to the brand here, we should look at the Apache OpenOffice (incubating) project. Let’s ask the question of the maintenance. We live in an environment where most of the large and not so large professional users of OpenOffice.org both from the private and public sector are using OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 or even 3.1 . A few of them already transitioned to LibreOffice and many are in the process of migrating to LibreOffice. But there is a large amount of these users who do not update their office suite every six months or even each year. These people are asking the question of the maintenance, and the question of the future. If we take LibreOffice out of the picture for a few moments now, what do we see? Apache OpenOffice (incubating): no stable release yet, but it’s planned anyway; other than that, no support nor patches for the previous versions of OpenOffice.org. Yet the important matter is the support of existing versions of OpenOffice.org . In other words, if you want to know whether anyone can claim to be the “real” continuation of OpenOffice.org, just ask this: will you support and fix the bugs that were found in OpenOffice.org 3.2.1? or OpenOffice.org 3.1? or even in the 3.3?

Today, neither the Apache OpenOffice (incubating) project, nor its steward, IBM, can answer positively to the question above. And no one should be mad at them for that. There are two reasons to this. The “OpenOffice” in “Apache OpenOffice (incubating)” does not imply a direct continuation. It’s a brand transfer. It’s a brand that got donated over to a respectable chartity. But it does not mean there’s a direct continuation. The other reason is because thanks to IBM, the Apache OpenOffice (incubating) will have a future, and no one should have any doubt about the success of the incubation of this project. I, for one, don’t have any. Just look at how much support from IBM this project gets: you see them at every corner of Apache OpenOffice so I’m really not worried about the outcome of the incubation period. More precisely, IBM does have very interesting plans for Apache OpenOffice, as it is turning a great deal of its Symphony code to the Apache OpenOffice code base. This is important as it outlines once again that Apache OpenOffice is not so much the continuation of OpenOffice.org “product-wise” as it is the IBM’s productivity suite ‘s future on the desktop. Again, this is great and positive news for the users in general as well as for the Document Foundation.

Marketing-wise we now have a better perception of the reality when it comes to the filiation of Apache OpenOffice (incubating) and it’s clearly not a poor one. Something this project does not acknowledge, however, is that the community at large has gone over to LibreOffice, which was created before by the OpenOffice.org community. The filiation of LibreOffice is quite clear and I had the opportunity to explain it on this blog the very day the Document Foundation was announced: We are OpenOffice.org . We are the next Decade and  we have no problems sharing our legacy. In fact, we’re dealing with the legacy of unused code agressively as we are acting upon it in the present, thereby improving our future versions. We don’t ask ourselves many questions about filiation: we know we must innovate in order to stay relevant and to offer a genuinely Free and Open Source Software of choice to the largest number of users out there. It was the mission of OpenOffice.org, and it is the mission of LibreOffice. But the important lesson we took out of OpenOffice.org and the LibreOffice adventure so far is that we must accept to change, to evolve and to be very aware of what we are wishing for. Legacy should not be a burden. It should not be something we should argue about. Rather, it ought to be a starting point, the point of origin. It’s neither a goal nor something we own; it’s something we’re proceeding from. If some at Apache OpenOffice (incubating) feel they are the rightful continuation of OpenOffice.org, I wish them good luck. They got a good brand but I hope they haven’t paid too much for it. If they feel so strongly about being the successors, the Document Foundation should gladly let them share that role, it’s not an easy one; the LibreOffice project, on the other hand, is not just a successor of OpenOffice.org. It has success. Legacy is only the starting point, our work define who we are and where we go.

When the Document Foundation and the LibreOffice project were announced by the end of September 2010 we explained that the only way for the community to secure the future of the OpenOffice.org project and its very soul was to create a foundation that would serve for the “next decade”. Our manifesto was very clear and still stands today. Our commitment to an independent foundation and to our core values, the respect of software freedom, our belief in a meritocratic community, the fundamental importance of true open standards, the preservation and growth of mothertongues everywhere in the world will remain the same for a long, long time. Incorporating our community as a foundation in Germany is an essential tool to ensure these values and the community will be given the full means to live and grow, while the software itself, freed from the barriers and limitations created by vendor lock-in, is getting better and better everyday.

It took us a long time to create the foundation in Germany. We highlighted our plans in a clear fashion one year ago when we called the community to donate money so that the initial capital stock and we were surprised and happy to see that, in less than a month, the double amount of donations necessary to secure the capital stock had been collected. The reason we spent almost one year to make the foundation a reality is that the type of legal entity we were aiming for was not the usual NGO people usually think about. It is a very specific kind of entity that is designed to secure and protect assets. Its real name is a “Stiftung bürgerlichen Rechts” or just “Stiftung ” (pronounce it “Stee-ft-oong”) and its litteral translation is “foundation”. Basically this entity does not work like a business or a corportation. It operates on a non-for-profit basis but it is designed to never allow anyone to seize its assets and what it is deemed to protect. You just cannot buy or take over this kind of entity. It almost works like a vault in a bank, except that there’s no bank and no one to ask you for the keys: you, the community, own every piece and parcel of the foundation. No bank, no third party is necessary here, we all inhabit the castle we just built, and mind you, this castle is made of steel and reinforced concrete to make sure there will be no capture of any kind; but at the same time, it lets the community free to operate as it wants.

Part of our mission is accomplished and I feel deeply good about this. We secured the future of the OpenOffice.org project and we have given its community a forever home. But it does not stop here. In fact, it’s just the beginning, as what we have achieved is to lay the cornerstone of our construction. Don’t be afraid, we’re not looking to build a cathedral but even bazaars need basilicas (in fact basilicas’ first purpose was to host bazaars).

Now we are free to move on, to innovate, to grow and to show the world that this old office suite of ours can be turned into the most exciting piece Free Software will see in a long time. The community is getting strong, growing by the day, but we need to strengthen it, to fix our own bugs, and to extend our reach to the web, to the tablets, while changing our codebase and our user interface. This is a job that is going to keep us busy for quite some time, but it’s worth the challenge: this is the new chapter in our history, the history of OpenOffice.org and now LibreOffice. It is probably not per chance that the same month the foundation was incorporated we released LibreOffice 3.5, our version with the largest amount of changes and fixes we ever offered and that we announced this great partnership with Intel. It shows the momentum a community can achieve, when, starting from the ground up, it is able to grow and move forward by making sure it keeps things simple, remains true to its spirit and realizes its full potential by being in charge.

To everyone who made this possible, I’m truly grateful. This has been an exciting month, and I look forward many more months to be (at least) that exciting.

Listening to user feedback hardly makes up a democracy. It’s user feedback. In some cases it might be a case of “nice customer service”. But it does not help that much. I’ll explain myself.

Let me describe to you what I called limited democracy here and how “power” and influence are distributed in FOSS projects.

A FOSS project mainly produces code. Its sole reason, in fact, is to produce code; whether someone pays for it or manages to be a guru at product strategy and marketing so well he can even entrance hackers in its “Reality Distortion Field” is another question. FOSS projects produce code. Then, around that rough code you have another categories of contributors: the QA testers, the localizers, the documentation writers, the marketers (no particular order here); sometimes you have the extension developers as well. All these people do something very specific: they contribute to the project. Granted it might not only be code, but that’s beside the point. They contribute and they make the project. The reason they contribute might be completely unknown to you, or there might be as many reasons as there are contributors. It’s good sometimes to question or to know what’s the “general reason” to contribute from one or two active contributors, but it’s not always necessary. Back to our contributors; they form the active people who push the project forward, heck, they are the project themselves. But because each of them might contribute for various and sometimes opposite reasons, any of them, sometimes even all of them or a good majority of them, will stop contributing; conversely, they might even increase their contribution. If you stick to the original line from Eric Raymond (the Cathedral and the Bazaar, a must read), the reason any developer would contribute is because he/she’d like to “scratch an itch”. Granted that scratch might be for hire or is already funded, but that’s besides the point.

In the end, it’s the people who make the software (and distribute it, promote it) who call the shots. They call the shots because they get to “make” the software at various levels. So it’s a meritocracy because it’s a “do-ocracy” in a sense. The good news here is that it makes up for quite a lot of people. The not so good news in a sense, is that “mere” users, by which I mean “passive” users, who do not contribute anything in terms of code, tests, localization, documentation, dictionaries, pamphlets, designs, etc. are only left with one choice: to use the software if they like it, or to stop using it. The only reason is not that it’s not a democracy, it’s just that they don’t have the power to act on the software project unless they adopt or reject it.

There is also a more subtle good part in this: no user is barred to join the contributors’ ranks; and when this user actually does, he’ll have a say as long as he remains a contributor.

There are projects who do not formally formalize too much who specifically are their contributors. Some others do. The Document Foundation does formalize it to the extent that it is our contributors who “own the foundation” and nobody else does. It’s not just in our social contract or an unwritten assumption, it’s legal . There are rather broad criteria to define what a contributor is and does (our bylaws and statutes define them) and anyone who qualifies become thus a member of the foundation with rather large ” political” rights. In this sense we have democracy. But FOSS projects do not run on open and democratic structure; they run on transparent and agreed processes, with a free and open source code at their core.

Picture by Eliane Domingos of the Document Foundation

If you wish to read our official wishes, we have them here, and they come from all of us. My thanks go to everyone who is making the LibreOffice project possible and what it is today. We have grown quite a lot in 15 months, probably more than we would have thought. 2012 is going to be the opportunity for the Document Foundation to solidify its successes and turn them into a powerful entity and structure. It will also be the year where several strategic project, such as LibreOffice OnLine, will see their development hopefully take off. Adoption-wise things are already well on their way. Deployments are ongoing on a worldwide basis, large and small, and what we  need at this stage is to push our brand name in a more consistent way. It will also be the year where our friends at the Apache Foundation release their first Apache OpenOffice; what will be interesting will be not their first release(s) but the one that will see most of the Lotus stack be injected into it. This will actually be a good opportunity to clearly differentiate Apache OpenOffice, and that in turns will improve the Apache OpenOffice project’s health and its relation with the outside world (LibreOffice being one example).

But 2012 will be the year where you will be able to experiment the benefits of the LibreOffice development’s effort as we will bring the 3.5 and the 3.6 lines to life. I think it will illustrate that a community-based development model does effectively work and brings real and regular improvements and changes to an aging codebase.

On a more personal note, 2012 will be an important year: I’m getting married in June (expect full delays in blog posting) and this is something I was not expecting even a few years ago. But there are a few people in this world (in this case, only one) who can change everything for the best, and for this I’m truly blessed and very, very happy.

Last but not least, I would like to express my gratitude to my family and my friends at the Document Foundation and at Ars Aperta for making all this a reality. You truly rock. What else is there to wish? Health, happiness, and love.

Merry Christmas and a happy new year 2012.

LibreOffice has an aging interface. It’s not just that it has many defaults, because, as much of the software packed with features tends to have this problem; it’s that LibreOffice looks a bit like it’s living in 2003. That reason alone is enough to want to change the whole UI. However the LibreOffice codebase is, despite constant clean-ups somewhat too complex to have its UI change overnight. Therefore we will be able to do so in an incremental fashion. What is needed is specifications developers can work with that target one specific user interface feature. With that, developers are able to “swallow” the specification and possibly implement it in a specific time frame. Will Citrus be the next LibreOffice UI? I don’t know. But if the design team is good at writing specifications (something some of its active members are in the process of learning) we might get to something that will have much in common with Citrus. The fineprint on this, however is that we need motivated volunteers able to work on UI improvements in an effective fashion, and developers’ resource to implement them.  If you are interested and would like to help, please join!

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Fast forward to the LibreOffice Conference in Paris. On the evening of the 14th we thought we would set up some beer and music party in a hacklab and we contacted the LOOP in Paris. While they had to migrate from one location to another we ended up in an alternative cultural space shared by hackers but also completely different people as well. What was really interesting to watch was the general blending of these populations. In the end, it should remind us that even the coming of the Document Foundation was and is at the same time the answer to the decay of a free software project struggling under the iron fist of an irresponsible and greedy corporation (Oracle)  and the perfect example of a community deciding what’s good for itself, having reached a point where “enough is enough”.

The LibreOffice Project is thus more than a free software project developing an office suite. It has started a bit before the events in Tunisia, but roughly at the same time the Iranian revolts were taking place (and they’re still going on by the way). It is about freedom and the individual power to refuse the will and the agenda of a large corporation. It is about realizing that something had been failing in our community and that it was time to fix it.

The Document Foundation was started because of that; and just like the people on the streets of the world, it was prepared  somewhat in a stealth mode at first, otherwise it  would have failed. Now things have become quite different, and we just celebrated our first year as a project and as a free community where everyone can fit in and contribute meaningfully to the greater good. The numbers speak for themselves, and the OpenOffice.org community has chosen to go for LibreOffice, not just as a product but as model, as a set of values and as a refusal to compromise one’s freedom to corporate agendas. Our manifesto highlights the goals and the values of the LibreOffice community and why the Document Foundation has been created and set up.

Yet we are not one fork among others. We are the next chapter of the next decade. We are LibreOffice, we are the Document Foundation. We are the people of OpenOffice.org . We are no puppets and no useful idiots. We bow to no one. We are here to fulfill the destiny of this great project: to create instruments of freedom and tools for knowledge.  We are “OOO”, we “Occupy OpenOffice” we stand for freedom, community, excellence and collaboration.

We are the 99%. Expect us.

I would like to come back shortly on two of the announcements we made, regarding the porting of the LibreOffice platform (not the interface) to iOS and Android, as well as LibreOffice OnLine. While these two projects are at various stages of completion and have different requirements they help to show not just the vitality of our community, they also shed some light on how we manage to embrace a bazaar-like approach to development and think about what I call our “development ecology” (which some could really translate into development strategy, but I think it’s more subtler than that). What you see through our online office suite project and platform porting announcements is that we are taking some great care in doing something paradoxal with respect to our stated intent to change the codebase as much as possible: we keep our codebase intact. Note that we do change, upgrade, clear and trim the codebase, but we do adopt a singular codebase approach where the code used in LibreOffice OnLine, and the underlying code on iOS and Android will essentially be the same than the one inside the LibreOffice Desktop suite. In other words, we do not release a product here and something completely different there, even if in the future, a specific work on the interface for tablets will have to be made (we won’t use the existing interface on these as it would not make sense).

This “universal” approach makes sense not just for “market growth” and adoption, it has two benefits. The first one is to pool the resources as much as we can, because maintaining millions of lines of code here while maintaining a million of new and different lines of code there would not require around 3 hundred developers; it would actually require 3 thousands of them. We thus keep the codebase as a coherent whole (hence Rob Weir’s confusion answered by something like “just pull the git”) while we will enjoy in the future the second benefit of being able to make changes (and even important ones) in one codebase, thus replicating the changes for the online version at the same time as they will be made available in the desktop or the tablet version.

Exciting times are ahead. Stay tuned!

It’s been a great year. It’s been a tough year. I learned a lot. I grew quieter. I tried to become more humble. I didn’t lose weight. I got engaged to the Love of my life. I helped pushing something nobody usually gets excited about: an office suite. But folks, beyond the code, beyond a community, beyond ourselves, we did more than an office suite.

We changed the world.

Thanks to a great team work and a small contest we now have a very nice conference template that you may download here that will be used by the conference speakers as their presentation template during the event. The next big step is to publish the detailed schedule of the conference. Right now all you may see is an outdated and rather imprecise looking schedule. This will change in the coming days.

The conference will take place in two locations. One is called La Cantine and is a famous meeting place for hackers and researchers communities in France. The place itself is located in one of these nineteenth century “passages couverts” of the french capital that were built from early napoleonic times till the middle of the century. Do not expect something monumental, neither outside in the Passage or inside La Cantine. The whole point of the place is to meet and collaborate, and that’s why such a location matters. La Cantine is located very much in the centre of Paris, behind the old stock exchange and two metro stations away from the Opera Garnier. The other location is the IRILL an acronym standing for International Research Institute for Free Software. This place is located near the Place d’Italie in the southeastern quadrant of the city. This is part of a much larger university in Paris, and the building is shared with a large post office (you might have the feeling you’re entering a post office the first time you’re getting there).The inside has a modern design and will sport two large conference rooms with all the equipment (even streaming video) that you come to expect. One of the two rooms is on the top floor of the building and has a roof garden accessible from the room itself. The other one has sofas for informal meetings in a corner with espresso machine not far away.

But the conference won’t be “only” about conference and talks. We have several events for the evenings and nights. On the 12th at 6 pm there will be the cocktail party by Cap Digital and on the 13th a rather big event at the Paris Region headquarters where pretty much everyone from the IT community in Paris is invited and is simply called the LibreOffice Party at la Region. This is not just an opportunity to drink and eat “for free”, it’s an opportunity to learn about quite a few announcements we’ve been keeping under wraps.  We hope to see all of you (and more!) there. The evening parties don’t stop there: there will be the Friday Night’s special by AF83 with beer and music.

Stay tuned and don’t forget to register if that’s not already done. See you soon in Paris!

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