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!

We will have 5 tracks : development, community, marketing; aside these, there will b two special tracks: one dubbed “technical bird of feather sessions” which is a “non-track” allowing anyone with a concrete issue or proposal to discuss it in front of the audience for 10 minutes (with five added minutes for questions) . You don’t need to submit everything for this one, but you’ll have to write your name on the spot and being queued for your talk. The second special track will be an ODF Master Class. It will gather both technical and policy-oriented talks and discussions about ODF in one big room. We will look for quality over quantity, but above all, we’re going to make this a fun, friendly and productive conference.

On the social and networking side, I can’t disclose too much what will happen; there will be parties, there will be cocktails, there will be announcements… We also hope you will enjoy the locations of the conference. As many of us come from the OpenOffice.org project we all have memories of large conference centers with an historical background. This year we decided to change things a little bit. Paris has enough monuments for everyone to enjoy;  but we wanted to “blend” our community with other projects and communities. That’s why we’ll have conferences in a wonderful places called La Cantine, a famous location for digital innovators and hackers, renowned for its BarCamps and its ability to gather many different kinds of people and entities to work towards one goal. We will also have conference at the IRILL (International Free Software Research Institute), an university building entirely dedicated to Free Software. Among other things, I hear you will be able to interact with several key Debian leaders and enjoy the design of this renovated building (with wireless connectivity).

Stay tuned for more information as we will be updating our Conference pages constantly. In any case, see you in Paris in October!

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.

Here’s a couple of links before an even more active month of May:

• Ars Aperta has contributed to a pretty interesting project, dubbed ODFgr and hosted by the OpenDoc Society. The goal of this website is to provide any developer with even a limited knowledge of ODF with resources and tools to manipulated ODF documents. We tried to design a pedagogical platform that the largest number will understand. Most of the examples are listed by languages (we mostly have Python and Perl) and you can study both the explanation and learn how to reproduce and implement it. We hope it will be the right spot for anyone willing to get started on OpenDocument hacking and development.
• Events-wise the month of May will be busy. I will attend the OASIS Board of Directors’ meetingin Berlin and meet with the Bitkom. The week after that Ars Aperta will join a session on the political and legal issues pertaining to Free Software development during the Linux Solutions 2011 event in Paris. I will also give another talk during the same event as part of the Document Foundation and our experience with forks. Spoons shall come next year.

• The Document Foundation has joined the OpenDoc Society. The OpenDoc Society is an international community (based in the Netherlands) that promotes the use of open standards such as ODF and helps various initiatives related to open standards. I think it illustrates our unwaving commitment to ODF -despite what you might have read around the Internet these past weeks- and you should expect more news to come about our commitment to ODF in the coming months.
• LibreOffice RC3 has been released; will we be releasing the final version soon? Suspense! In any case, give it a shot, and bring us your feedback!
• By now you may have noticed that we do indeed have a new and beautiful website. I would like to thank everyone who worked hard on it. In fact since the Steering Committee of the Document Foundation wanted to improve the clarity and the organization of the work around the website it has decided to appoint a team of four persons who will effectively further the development of our website, each of these persons being responsible of one specific area: content, site design, user experience and site administration/infrastructure.
• While we have a final draft of our Community Bylaws we hadn’t implemented them. Part of the reason was a lack of time, and part of the reason was that we felt that until we hadn’t properly incorporated our foundation we might have been led to amend them for legal reasons. Yet some people pointed out that we could at least start to implement them and progressively enact them as to enable a clear governance and leadership of the community. It’s a good point. So we started by appointing the first Membership Committee, while the Engineering Steering Committee will be formalized very soon.  The Membership Committee is in charge of managing our contributors, who in turn have the power to elect the Board of Directors, run as candidates for various roles, etc. It is in fact this process that defines the fabric of our community, and it’s therefore a crucial one, for almost everything else will depend on contributors running our project.
• Much in the same way we were lacking a trademark policy. We were really missing one, with people coming to us asking for the permission to use our logos and names and also a few people misrepresenting themselves as LibreOffice or the Document Foundation. Here’s the stable draft; we’re waiting for legal reviews on it.
• We also started to work on the incorporation of the Document Foundation. As we have chosen to incorporate an actual foundation in Germany, the process will take time, effort and money. We will keep you posted on this.
• We will be present at several shows soon, throughout the world: the FOSDEM in Brussels and the SCALE in southern California: come and visit us!
• Last but not least we just received the news that the former “OOoAuthors” team who was writing quite a lot of good user documentation for OpenOffice.org has changed its name to ODFAuthors, working now on manuals and documentation about LibreOffice as well. Congratulations folks, we look forward working with you !

LibreOffice is not owned by Novell. LibreOffice is independent, is a project created by the Document Foundation that counts Novell, Red Hat, Canonical, Google, BrOffice and many other entities and people as its supporters. Yes, Novell, Debian, Red Hat engineers (and others) contribute to the code of LibreOffice.

LibreOffice, just like OpenOffice.org offers the ability to handle documents in the format of Microsoft Office 2007 and 2010. As we know, these are called OOXML but are different from the ISO standard (ISO 29500) known as OOXML. Microsoft is trying hard, as far as I know, to work out something that might be implemented by MS Office 2010 and is known as OOXML Transitional, which is the polite label to call a proprietary format that still comes with a lot of undocumented areas. OpenOffice.org has offered such a feature ever since 2008, not by reading whatever specification was sent to the ISO, but in analyzing the format used in the real world and called OOXML . (yes it’s confusing) If OOo had tried to implement OOXML by reading the standard it would have ended in a dead corner, because as we know, the OOXML ISO standard is broken, and the ISO itself with it.

LibreOffice is no different than that. But there is one addition compared to OpenOffice.org: where OpenOffice.org allowed the reading of MS Office 2007 and 2010 documents only, we allow their editing and saving under the same format. It does not imply any dramatic extension of features: the same capability is in OpenOffice.org, but it’s been intentionally crippled around 2007 or 2008 for obvious strategic reasons (OOXML hadn’t become a standard yet and MS Office 2007 new formats hadn’t been widely distributed). I would not be surprised if Oracle were to enable such a feature in the coming months.

The other factor was that people connected dots: Quite murky details about the Novell/Microsoft emerged recently thanks to Groklaw : and what was known by many of us, discussed on this blog for quite some time, became apparent to the eyes of everyone: Novell got paid by Microsoft to promote OOXML and to implement some compatibility layers with it inside Go-OO. So people connected the dots, and I would understand their concern, if it had been voiced in a more polite tone and in a less oracular and imperative tone. But it was a mixed bag of everything: “stop implementing OOXML now, you’re traitors and owned by Novell, and by the way you’re based on Go-OO”. Therefore I’d like to clarify certain things again:

• LibreOffice is an independent project, not owned by Novell and not even based on Go-OO. But it’s based on OOo with some patched of Go-OO, and now more than ever before, it’s making its own choices.
• LibreOffice strives to be an independent community, not an area for people who do not know how to contribute to Free and Open Source Software Communities, do not even want to learn but only want to stand on their soapbox and shout whatever they will please. Just take a look at the founders of the Document Foundation: there are Novell engineers. Some others work for Red Hat, some others come from Debian, some others are talented community individuals, and then there’s yours truly. Call it a worldwide conspiracy for Novell if you want, and sit on it. If there’s anything that should be clear, it’s that we are for ODF. We’ve joined the OpenDoc Society, and we will be joining the OASIS Consortium as soon as we can. Free Software, Open Standards, Community and Innovation, that’s what we strive for.
• Of course, there will be the question that needs to be asked: Are we falling into Novell’s trap (or rather Microsoft’s trap) ? I think we aren’t and we won’t. Truth be told, the Document Foundation is not aware of any secret pact between Novell and Microsoft to stuff LibreOffice with OOXML and patents (were it only because 1) their cooperation is ending soon 2) MS was not in the know about LibreOffice until a long time, and Novell does not own anything in LibreOffice). But the more important -and perhaps some will find it naive- is that the Novell people we’re working with, among them Michael Meeks, Thorsten Behrens, Kendy (and all the others) have so far proven to be not just reliable and trustworthy, but also good and loyal fellows of ours. They’re not in this to serve Mr Ballmer and the dancing ponies of Redmond Club: they’re in this because just like me, just like all of us, the founders of the Document Foundation, we believe in Freedom, Free Software and Open Standards. And if it were of any reassurance to anyone: if one day we had the evidence of patches directly resulting from a secret agreement between Novell and Microsoft on LibreOffice, I trust the community would replace them as soon as possible.

Happy New Year everyone, and may the Force be with you!

• It’s Holiday Season, nonetheless, and I thought you may want to take a look at how Christmas looks in Paris, especially under the snow. (Paris is a city that looks particularly beautiful under the snow). Prête-moi Paris has all the details.

• The Opera Browser 11 has just been released, with some very nice tab-docking features, among other things. Yes, it’s proprietary, but it’s innovative and truly standards-compliant.

• India embraces Open Standards for good. Interesting read from Venkatesh Hariharan.

• The EIF and EIS 2.0 are published at last. In many ways it is disappointing, but it is at the same time a clear political gesture in favor of open standards and true interoperability.

• Murky details about the famous CPTN’s buying of Novell’s patents. The result? It looks like the mob just bought the latest casino at Atlantic City.

Best wishes for the Season!

“”The Document Foundation is about documents and the associated software is pivotal to create, exchange, modify, share and print documents”, says Thorsten Behrens, a software developer and a member of TDF Steering Committee. “LibreOffice 3.3 is the first flavour of this long term strategy, but the journey has just begun, and the enormous advantages of our developer-embracing environment are not yet fully reflected in the upcoming software release”.

LibreOffice 3.3 is based on OOo 3.3, with code optimisations and many new features, which are going to offer a first preview of the new development directions for 2011 and beyond. TDF founders foresee a completely different future for the office suite paradigm, which – in the actual format – is over 20 years old, to be based on the document (where the software is a layer for the creation or the presentation of the contents).

TDF developers are working full steam at improving the overall quality of OOo code, which is a good starting point, and making easy testability of the code and quality assurance a priority. This is an area where new developers and code hackers, whose number has grown to over 90 in just a month, are instrumental for the bulk of the activity.

In addition, each single module of LibreOffice will be undergoing an extensive rewrite, with Calc being the first one to be redeveloped around a brand new engine – code named Ixion – that will increase performance, allow true versatility and add long awaited database and VBA macro handling features. Writer is going to be improved in the area of layout fidelity and Impress in the area of slideshow fidelity. Most of the new features are either meant to maintain compatibility with the market leading office suite or will introduce radical innovations. They will also improve conversion fidelity between formats, liberate content, and reduce Java dependency.

“The Document Foundation is going to be at the heart of the Free Software universe, where users want to build a different future for office suites, working together with developers”, says Italo Vignoli, a digital immigrant, and the oldest member of TDF Steering Committee. “Users read, write, modify and share documents, and are focused on contents rather than software features. After 20 years of feature oriented software, it is now the right time to bring back content at the centre of user focus”.”

The statements quoted above unveil several items. This is not a press release about the community itself, it’s a press release showing the result of a liberated community at work. And what does a liberated community at work do? Not only does it fix what can be fixed on the spot; it  is not shy in assessing whether the code base it’s working on is going to be relevant in 5 years and whether the state of the art has changed. Therefore we, the community, gathers around a few simple (but in fact quite complex ideas):

1. Our code base is getting old. Worse, the whole frigging software looks  and feels like we’re stuck in the Bush area. Many things were not fixed, some others need a complete rewrite.
2. The Document is really the epicenter, the conundrum’s point, and software should be built around it, not as if documents were some sort of odd appendices. It’s not just the user that matters, it’s that when the document is what the software is running for, rather than running with, you end up with much more ability to create, share and innovate.  In fact, designing software following this concept leads you to develop something quite different from office suites. That’s a shift of paradigm.
3. It’s time to realize people hate using office suites. You can make them more visually compelling, more practical, and we want that too. But it’s the tool that is the problem in itself. No one really knows why we have to stick to specific features; Powerpoint was a nice visual concept in the eighties; it became a management tool. Who could have guessed it?  Therefore, there is an urgency in making office suites fun to use, by allowing users to unleash their creativity, win time and efforts, there fore make their lives easier and more enjoyable.

The way the Document Foundation is going to address these issues is twofold: First, we will have incremental changes on LibreOffice, although these changes will sometimes be quite visible. This will allow to solve real and identified issues by maintaining the overall code stability and homogeneity. Second, we will open new development initiatives aimed at rewriting entire portions of the codebase (leading in the end to a complete rewrite) that we think are the most urgent to be rewritten. Mind, however, that we won’t have a rewrite for the sake of a rewrite. I think that Ixion, the spreadsheet rewrite project, will show that we’re in this game to change it. Yes you read well: Initiatives such as Ixion will not lead to a nice MS Office clone. It will be a radical departure from what we have today.

These two tracks will thus offer the choice between improved stability and radical innovation, and somewhere down the line, these two will merge, somehow. But that story has yet to be written.

Stay tuned!