The financial crisis people started to notice around 2008 is not just financial. It goes deeper than what we usually want to admit. It is about a fundamental shift in our civilization’s balance of power, our survival plans, our values and our way of life. I regret to say that …
It’s been one year, and I still can’t believe time has gone so fast. I would like to thank everybody who has been making the LibreOffice Project what it is today, and what it will become in the years to come. To the first founders and to the newcomers these …
Yesterday Michael Brauer posted on the OASIS ODF TC mailing list his farewell post. Michael, like a very large number of the other employees of the “Oracle’s Hamburg Business Unit”, if not all of them, will be let go by the end of the month. If you wonder what the …
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 …
I was expecting the point in time during the setup phase of the Document Foundation where we would start to hear the first critics and doubts about what we are doing and where we’re heading. This is never a good time, not because the questions make me uncomfortable, but because …
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 …
In the first part of this essay I attempted to describe how communities around Free & Open Source Software (FOSS) projects are born and what is their underlying model. After having described the conditions necessary to have communities emerge around Free and Open Source Software I used Simon Phipps’ s …
How do you define”Community” in Free and Open Source Software projects? What are the roles of a community? How does one become part of a community? I think these are important questions the LibreOffice project and the Free & Open Source Software in general, and I would like to talk …
The news of the giant earthquake, tsunami and of the situation at several nuclear powerplants near the epicenter of the quake must have reached pretty much everyone on the Web. I have just read that a new earthquake of magnitude 7 is expected to happen anytime between tonight and the …