Historically, OpenOffice.org has been one of the most downloaded Free Software out there and one of the most used (the real market share was estimated to be around 15%, far higher than the estimates based on the shipment of MS Office) all around the world. But for all its user base, OpenOffice.org proved incapable to growing a vibrant ecosystem of support and service providers, value-added resellers, OEMs and integrators. Initiatives had been launched with mixed success. Judging by its yield and popularity, OpenOffice.org was a complete business failure – and not just to Sun’s own bottomline.

The reasons for this are a bit difficult to explain, but a certain number had to do with the lack of project governance and ability to decide for itself on one side, and the lack of business development and proper management of the project towards the wider FOSS business ecosystem. Beyond the poor growth of the business ecosystem, this led to unsatisfactory situations. Potential or existing professional users of OpenOffice.org very often asked questions about the future of the project, and wanted to know what would happen if Sun ever pulled the plug. They wanted to make sure that the service provider they had selected would be able to effectively contribute a patch. Worse, because of the hazy governance of the project, trademark enforcement was almost non-existent and anyone could claim to be an expert in OpenOffice.org migrations and support. This is how some large scale migrations ended up in disaster, while real experts were not called and no revenue was coming to them; this is also how fraudulent websites could trick unsuspecting visitors in downloading spyware or in making them pay their download.

The certification program we announced does nothing in the way of trademark enforcement of course. But it helps with the former, that is, to grow the business ecosystem and make sure potential users and customers enjoy a real clarity when it comes to professional skills around LibreOffice. Right now we are starting with LibreOffice development professionals, but we will be rolling out other skills category such as migration specialists, trainers, etc. The net benefit is that by structuring the business ecosystem around LibreOffice we let the people who provide real added value gain visibility and official status, while on the other end of the rope, companies or administrations are able to make a clear and informed choice. This in turn greatly diminishes failures in deployments and migrations and provides interested professionals with the opportunity to train and become certified professionals.

We will see how this program works, and I’m confident it will; after all, while it’s correct to assume it’s a first for a FOSS project to create such a certification program, it’s however not unusual to have trained and certified professionals in the FOSS industry. I’m particularly thinking about the LPI certification from the Linux Professional Institute or the JBoss certified professionals. We, in turn, would like to see the Certification Program becoming as prevalent as these two, but only time will tell how well it is accepted and adopted. In any case, we’re in this for the long run, so stay tuned for more announcements in this field.

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.

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.

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.

I would like to tell the “Hamburg team” as we often used to call them that they should have no regrets whatsoever. Perhaps my words will surprise some, after all, I didn’t leave the OpenOffice.org project under Hamburg’s cheers.  It does not matter in the grand scheme of things; what I’m doing for the Document Foundation is what matters now and the shutdown of the operations at Hamburg shows once again that the people behind the Document Foundation were right from the start: Oracle’s stewardship of the OpenOffice.org project would neither be sustainable nor workable. I, for one, wish that in an ideal world, most of the Hamburg team would have transitioned over to the LibreOffice project. Unfortunately, that’s not the case, but life is made so that things are never really perfect.  StarDvision team, you gave birth to many good things, your work now lives in several software, most important of all them, in LibreOffice and the Document Foundation; Apache Openoffice.org/Symphony carries your name, and will use a great deal of your code as well. Even more importantly, the Hamburg team, through the OpenOffice.org project, has also attracted and helped many people from all walks of life who over the years have worked together and grown as a team. That is the case for me, and it’s the case for many other people. You have brought us so much, and I would like to express my sincere gratitude for all what you’ve done. You have started something incredibly important; your work will not have been made in vain, and it will continue to bear fruit for a long time.

Take care!

It’s been several weeks I hadn’t updated this blog. I was quite busy but I really avoided to comment on the latest developments at Apache and OpenOffice.org. Now that the OpenOffice.org project has formally been voted as an Apache project in incubation phase, I feel I can more easily comment on this latest move.

To start with the straight question; what do I think about this? I do have mixed feelings about Oracle moving the OpenOffice.org assets to the Apache Foundation. As explained in the Document Foundation’s official press release, this is a missed opportunity to reunite OpenOffice.org to the Document Foundation. By reuniting the two Oracle wouldn’t have accomplished a reconciliation, as there was no real need for this (whatever reconciliation would happen on a personal level) , but it would have brought order and coherence to the free and open source software office suites. Instead, Oracle chose -in a move where resentment and vengeance were not absent- to dump the OpenOffice.org code and trademark to the Apache Foundation without the Oracle engineers who had been working on it since fifteen years.

The player who was apparently enjoying the announcement in the most public fashion was IBM. Trailing the formal announcement of Oracle, one very official press release from Armonk, followed by IBM bloggers with an uncanny sense of certainty and confidence that OpenOffice.org had come of age at last. Ten days after the announcement, the press is anything but enthusiastic, and the promoters of the move to Apache resolved themselves to address the obvious elephant in the room: LibreOffice. If anything went really bad in these past ten days, it would be the willful ignorance by corporations of the community itself, and its move to create the LibreOffice project and the Document Foundation 8 months ago. I guess we will wonder for a long time why it was deemed necessary by some to ignore the basic reality around LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org: While there might be two projects, there really is only one community. Anyone trying to pretend it otherwise would miss the big picture.

But then, where does it leave us? Nowhere new, really, and this for two reasons.

The incubator project called OpenOffice.org might end up being very different from the project currently located at www.openoffice.org ; the governance structure, now led by the Apache Foundation, the few proposed developers are different people (I will refrain to sing the now famous tune “but they don’t have enough developers” I’ve heard so much about LibreOffice and that I still sometimes hear). Sure, a few people from the “former” project have signed up. They even have the same old community manager ad vitam ; but when you look closely, it’s hard to see anyone there who would be able to contribute anything meaningful except for two kinds of people: IBM & Red Office engineers. Their number barely amounts to a dozen. This number and the people who either fish for opportunity or hold personal grudges against the Document Foundation (there are always people like that) make up the list of the OpenOffice.org project committers.

Second, I cannot imagine the relevance of a new Openoffice.org project that would compete against LibreOffice. The “competition-is-good” argument does not stand here, as it would be a mere division of resources. That’s why I think that the project will have to find a different role and mission than to do exactly the things it was doing before. Side-stream (and not upstream) code for Symphony, LibreOffice, common development house for ODF APIs and libs are honorable and relevant goals for such a project.

But I see something else happening that is actually quite good in my view. The presence of IBM developers inside incubator project means that at the very least, IBM will be pushing code to the OpenOffice.org codebase, effectively changing the “orbit” of the OpenOffice.org project from Oracle / Sun to IBM. If I take my reasoning a bit farther, it might mean that IBM will directly influence the project inside Apache, essentially making it progressively different from the LibreOffice project. It would reinstate, then, the dichotomy behind a proprietary office suite and its weaker cousin, with Symphony instead of StarOffice (unless IBM would liberate the code of Symphony, which would be an excellent move).

With all the points discussed above I have not mentioned the possible opportunities for collaboration between the two projects. I think there are very clear and exciting ones, especially around ODF, which unites us all, from IBM to the Document Foundation. That’s why I welcome the Apache Incubator project for OpenOffice.org despite all its shortcomings and the missed opportunity. I think we’re better with it than without it and prefer this to a slow death of the project in the hands of Oracle. True, I have refrained from casting any non-binding vote on the Apache lists in favor of or against the Apache incubation of the OpenOffice.org project. I feel it wouldn’t have made any sense to cast a non-binding ballot. I look forward working with the OpenOffice.org project, and believe very much that in the end, not in a very long time, we will be truly reunited. In the meantime, and to quote from the press, let’s build the most exciting Free Software project besides Firefox, LibreOffice!

These days I started to see some questions arise here and there, about why we’re not proceeding as fast as we could with the setup of the legal entity, why we sometimes fail to communicate a vision for the project, etc. These are all good questions. Ultimately, we have to react to them by acting on the issues that are raised. Yet it is important to keep in mind that the light at the end of the tunnel is growing fast.  I hope (I know) we will soon see several announcements pertaining to the community and the project. We’re working hard at making the foundation a reality, but we’re also working hard at securing the Document Foundation’s financial future and at improving our community processes. Questions that arise about these matters are legitimate, and if you feel we’re not answering them, then it means we’re either swamped or are currently not able to answer them (because of various constraints). But we do read them, we do hear them. And they will be answered, either in writing, or in solid fact, usually expressed by an announcement. You can help make many things a reality by contributing to the LibreOffice project. It’s fun, it’s even exhilarating and it’s a formidable human adventure alongside being technically exciting and challenging.

Among the questions I was mentioning above, there are some that aren’t really questions, but are critics that are not uttered in a constructive way. These are critics that come from those who have chosen a different course and for whom the Document Foundation is by no means a symbol of digital freedom and software freedom. You will hear them singing many tunes, until their voices gradually faint in the background chatter. We can take some critics in a constructive way, as feedback to build a better project. But extravagant theories claiming that we are the pawns of Microsoft and that we are in fact detrimental to Free Software are delusions of people who do not understand anything to the way free and open source software communities work. Which is a shame, as some of them actually used to “manage” communities (and still claim they do, but one wonders who mandated them to even pretend to the title).  These critics are in fact detrimental to Free Software and to the ODF ecosystem, as they come across as awkward in the light of the events that have taken place since a few months. When everything is said and done, the LibreOffice project’s goals have been the right ones since the very first day and firing people off their roles inside the OpenOffice.org project hasn’t made them any less right today. An old but famous Persian saying tells that caravans keep going on their path while dogs bark at them.  The Document Foundation is a bit like a caravan, in that we’re a diverse community travelling towards one goal and not hesitating to include people on our way. We share our bread, we share our wine, we share our fire, and we even accept donations. Some people will call it awkward, will demand some “adult supervision”, will doubt each of our step, question our skills and postulate ulterior motives, but in the end, we shall prevail and we will be THE Free and Open Source Office Suite, innovative, open standards-based and developed in a transparent and inclusive way. Let the dogs bark. They really only wish they could be leading the party.

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!

The very first comment that somewhat counters’ Phipps’ s model is that it ignores the fundamentally dynamical nature of FOSS communities and the inherent sociological rejection of any real “stable” state of the social structure inside these communities. It means two things: That anyone from the end-user community may turn into a core developer provided he/she has the skills and provides relevant contributions in the relevant way (in my example, the end-user would have to contribute code patches in a regular fashion to become a core developer); second, that the members of these communities have no status that is carved in stone. You are not born a core developer, you become one, but you won’t remain one until you keep contributing. This in turn highlights two notions that are essential inside FOSS communities and that may be seen, as I wrote earlier, as an additional, yet necessary description of the way FOSS communities work through and beyond the typology enunciated by Simon.

But first let’s go back to my example of the core developer who has to keep on contributing unless his role and standing diminishes. What this example shows is that FOSS communities are at their very core “do-ocracies” ruled by the social contract created by the sheer existence of digital commons. Measuring how efficient the social contract may be means to evaluate how open and welcoming the authors/developers/core team are to new contributions. If that’s not the case then of course, FOSS allows code forking, and then the new social contract might be reinstated in a better way. What becomes apparent in these examples, however, is that the notion of contribution is perennial in assessing how a community works and what the standard for this assessment should be. Contribution is pretty much the only thing that gives both meaning and purpose to a FOSS community and is in fact the only activity that matters. The reasons for contributing code, materials, designs, documentation, QA, efforts of various kinds such as users’ support may be very different from one individual to another; the same stays true for a business contributing to such a project, yet it is out of the scope of this essay. Nonetheless, contribution is more than adding one little piece more to the overal project. It is the very fabric of the project and its community.  Contributions may differ in quantity, quality and nature; the only people who are not contributing -in theory the end users- are the only ones who cannot properly have their say inside the project by themselves. This sentence needs to be clarified: Unless someone engages with the project by contributing something it will benefit from the protection and the rights of the FOSS licence itself and the availability of the said software as a common digital good. Beyond this, his/her standing inside the project is theoretical. This is why the end-user community lies the farthest from the core of the project. Of course, and this is especially true in projects developing software meant to be used by everyone (i.e Mozilla Firefox, LibreOffice…) end users may be regularly heard because dedicated activities and teams will collect their feedback and engage volunteers in user experience testing, designs, etc. But the very same people engaging in these activities cease being passive at the very moment they start contributing time, effort and sometimes expertise to these activities and enter the “extenders’ community” if we stick to Simon Phipps’ s model. It is therefore crucial not so much to implement users feedback strategies – that truly depends on the project and its scope- but to make sure the barriers to contribution, not just of code but of anything else is low enough to encourage end-users’ interest and involvement.

Contribution also breed what I often call the sense of appropriation, which is, for any given contributor, the feeling of co-ownership of the project and the digital commons developed by the project. This sense of co-ownership implies the adherence to the project’s goal while steering the will to do more and be more inside that community, depending of the person. This sense of appropriation may wane to the point where the contributor will stop contributing, and if several contributors lose appetite and fun contributing it is often a clear sign that something wrong is going on inside the community.Therefore the concept of meritocracy ,when properly applied in a community, is usually one of the best tools to grow that community as it remains as one of the main, if not the sole sane principles of community building. Meritocracy is the direct consequence of the value of contribution in a FOSS project.  Anything else in FOSS, such as democracy, ultimately lowers contributions to the benefit of uninvolved people and to the law of numbers, masses and manipulation. That’s why FOSS has never been about democracy but about meritocracy, even if it practices limited democracy among its contributors. But that notion belongs to community processes. Read on.

I have written above that contributions may differ in quantity, quality and nature. It is pretty often difficult to judge contributions objectively when they are made in code patches or bug reports. There are however many other ways to contribute aside code in a FOSS project. The question is not whether there is a standard to assess contribution; there is none, really and each community will evaluate them in a different way depending on its purpose, its history and its sociology. The question revolves around the decision-making process either in between various teams of the community. A good example is a situation where core developers want to go ahead with a release of a version they deem to be stable while the QA team is in disagreement with the core developers because of one specific outstanding bug that’s considered to be annoying enough to block the release. Staying within that case, let’s picture the UX team (user experience team) with one latest push on icons or one specific graphical detail, requesting the inclusion of its latest effort to the core developers. Can anyone tell who will have its own way?

If we refer to the threefold typology of the community described by Simon Phipps, the model is very static but one would say that the core developers would be able to dictate their own decision to the others as they are the ones who directly write the code and therefore have the broadest influence over it. While this is true, the ultimate consequence of this would lead to the complete disintegration of the community, as the powers would be vested once and for all to the core developers with everyone else bowing at them. While developers do make the code, the digital commons, by themselves (although it could be pointed out it’s not always the case) we could demonstrate that the domination of one category of contributors by the others is tyrannical and goes against meritocracy. If marketeers were to have their say in a constant way over developers, this would not be a Free and Open Source Software project anymore, it would mean working at Apple Inc. This highlights the need for community processes. Community processes are not just the processes leading to code creation and release. It is pretty much anything from governance to team setup, conflict resolution and release process.

Community processes thus have a rather broad scope. But they are -or should be- designed to strengthen and uphold meritocracy and transparency, by making sure specific rules of community work are clear and known. They are also supposed to provide the necessary environment for balancing power, which means that they define governance and governance processes. Community processes and governance do fulfill a need that the sheer meritocratic structure does not or rather cannot meet: it manages issues and decides of the political structure (political here is understood in its first sense, that is, the concern of the polis, the city, the tribe) of several people working together on specific but different tasks as a community.

We can now manage to enunciate the following propositions:

• contributions are the fuel for a project (not even money, and even less talk)
• community processes enable issues and conflict resolutions through governance and lower-level processes
• these processes cover contributors inclusion and allow them to contribute.

The term “community” thus needs to be defined with a certain accuracy as it covers several realities and as it is not necessarily a well-understood term. I can roughly and simply answer the initial question with the following (long) sentence:

A Free and Open Source Software community is a loosely knit group of teams and individuals contributing in various ways to a specific project with the help of specific tools, processes and governance yet without any overarching authority imposed from an external source, but from a structure that stems directly from themselves and ensures that the merit of each is rightly valued and taken into consideration from the ground up and in a transparent way.

Comments welcome!