Support and OpenOffice.org

This is a not atypical scenario: Government Blue wants to adopt foss but is uncertain about support, services, training, certification, liability, not to mention the longevity of the foss project in question. So, even though that free technology is gratis and more powerful, extensible and secure, Blue decides to stick with the status quo, as that SQ satisfies the crucial (and wholly nontechnical) requirements that the purchasing department insists upon. From the purchasing department's perspective, this scenario is simply anarchic chaos and very undesirable.

I've noticed this now for several years and have suggested the same remedy: related foss groups can form consortia. The result would be a single vendor who is responsible for all the above. Support can be contracted out, as can the other elements. The crucial point here is that Blue would not be dealing with a single responsible vendor.

Of course, this demands considerable cooperation among groups and individuals who formed small businesses and became independent precisely because they wanted to work alone. But it's necessary, I think.

OpenOffice.org fortunately is addressing this problem, though we still have some ways to go. Well over 350 companies offer professional support and services in many languages and in many lands; and that is not even counting Sun Microsystems, which offers per-call support for OpenOffice.org users. We list support options, free and not, at http://support.openoffice.org/.

We have ways to go. I would love it that when a user downloads OpenOffice.org (and most who download it form the OOo are Windows users), they are presented with support options. And that companies recognize the options available to them: that foss projects like OpenOffice.org are both community and professionally supported.

On Festival Software Livre, Brasilia, October 5-6

To say that Brazil has taken to OpenOffice.org and software livre is an understatement. Claudio Filho, the lead of the Brazilian Language project, and one of the leads of the BrOffice.org group, estimated that there are about 10 million OOo users here. (One must use BrOffice.org instead of OpenOffice.org in Brazil for trademark reasons.)

Like most countries, Brazil remains primarily a consumer of FOSS, not a producer. And although one will save money with free software, one has not changed the relationship to the commodity that free software offers: one is still a consumer and effectively in debt to others for the product. That is something that I and many others would like to change. In my previous trips here, especially the last, in April of this year, I've tried to encourage students, professors and other would-be developers to consider working on OOo. Although I certainly hold out the hope that many would-be new participants would do so at their leisure (and have, say, a day job), I am cognizant that many (most) would likely participate as part of their job. OOo has certainly become easier to work on and one may contribute in any number of ways that have little to do with coding; and , to be sure, we have made it much easier to create extensions. But to work on OOo code requires an allocation of resources. And that implies that OOo be seen as popular enough, powerful enough, and possessed of a future. It has to be seen as worth the investment. Just saving millions of dollars is probably not enough; after all, regressing to typewriters or pens and pencils would also save money, as does not doing anything at all.

(Status quo or regression is tantamount to erecting a fatal wall of isolation. The fact is that the modern world requires the tools that can produce electronic documents and it also requires interoperability. Isolation of any sort is hobbling. At the same time, it's also clear that if a nation is expected to compete globally, its residents need access to the tools of production. They cannot just be limited to the elites nor can we accept the proliferation piracy as any sort of solution to giving all the appearance of access to informatic tools of production. [Pirated copies of proprietary software are still proprietary and have all the encumbrances we have come to expect.])

Brazil and other nations increasingly recognize the problem of being merely consumers and the advantages of becoming producers. Moving from one to the other, let alone moving simply enough to foss, is not trivial. The move to foss saves money; the move to producing foss also saves money, but in cases can also cost. One has to shift educational systems and in some cases encourage markets. Relying on the invisible hand for all this probably doesn't work, at least not at this stage. It doesn't work because in a monopoly environment, there is no invisible hand; there is no real market: that's what a monopoly is all about. The agent enabling this shift has historically been the government: it alone has the ability and the responsibility. For what's at stake here is not the success of one private company or another but a lot more, the commercial health of the nation.

But back to the Festival. Held in the Catholic University (Universidade Católica de Brasilia) just outside Brasilia, and sponsored by an impressive array of local and multinational companies, the event, the second in as many years, spanned two days and included presenters from various ministries as well as national and multinational companies. Its primary organizer, Kleber Fígaro Rozado,the director of Training Tecnologia, invited me. I went down uncertain of the audience; it turned out to be mostly students, which was good, as they were clearly engaged. Even more encouraging, the professors were clearly interested in furthering the connection to fosters users and developers. They want their students to be producers. (Follow up emails have been sent but more needs to be done to ensure that what was sown in October actually bears fruit.)

As is always my fate, I was too occupied with impromptu meetings and discussions to attend all the presentations, which was a pity. But I did catch the Caixa presentation, David Kuhn's of Serpro, Keith Bright's of IBM, and in some ways my favourites, Maddog's.One of the really encouraging things about Caixa's presentation was mention of their contributions to OpenOffice.org. Unlike so many who use without contributing, they recognize that absent their contributions, the fruit may not just whither but never arise. Foss projects need participation, else we are back to commodity dynamics.

I only regret that i had to leave so soon and was unable to enjoy the pleasure of seeing friends. I am glad I was able to renew my acquaintance with Roberto Salomon, now of IBM and one of the leads of the Brazilian language project, and of course, to say hello to Claudio again. I hope to see them again soon, at next year's fisl, an event not to be missed.

FOSS publishing

Last May I had the pleasure of boring people at the LGM event in Montreal, where I met some of the Scribus team and also learned more about FOSS publishing and graphics. As a kind of update, my friend, Mayank Sharma, sent me a link to the magazine he writes for, o3:magazine, and its issue #9 is on open-source publishing. I pitch it here not because Mayank asked me to, but because the magazine touches on creating documents with OpenOffice.org. In particular, Mayank's article on "Collaborative editing with OpenOffice[.org]" is useful and interesting for both editors and writers. I would add that with 2.3, we have improved the component considerably.

Worth a read.

State of the project, the fuller account

In my speech on the State of the Project, which I gave at the recent OOoCon in Barcelona, I promised I'd provide the fuller account here, in this blog. I meant to do it immediately after the conference, but as is the nature of these promises, other things intervened. But, here is the fuller account.

Every year I ask the project leads to tell me (and the community) what their project has done that is interesting, cool, important, and to let us all know who was responsible. FOSS thrives on community recognition. Below is simply the responses, more or less in the order I received them. A few, I have edited.


Joost Andrae, QA Project
Speaking for the QA project one of the highlights were the introduction of Nakata Maho as new QA project lead and Caio Tiago Oliveira de Sousa as co-lead besides myself. The structure of the QA project has been widened by application related sub teams. The QA homepage has been re-worked. The skills of QA team members improved considerably. There were QA related meetings in Germany (eg. in Essen) and the OpenOffice.org team in Germany was present at the CeBIT trade fair. Most important: Various versions of OpenOffice.org got released. The cooperation between native language teams and the QA project intensified.


Charles-H. Schulz, Native Language Confederation.
I think we should mention our struggle for open standards and freedom, the (so far) triumph of ODF worldwide. As for names, I have many: Davide Dozza, Florian Effenberger, Claudio Filho, Pavel Janik, Leif Lodahl, Jeongkyu Kim, Rail Aliev, Alexandro Colorado Michael Brauer, Erwin Tenhumberg, you, my humble self... and I'm forgetting some others.


Frank Schönheit, Base
For Base, the Report Builder is certainly the most important accomplishment over the last year. It provides a dedicated user interface for creating reports, using Pentaho's reporting engine, formerly known as JFreeReport. Ocke Janssen was the brave man :) who implemented this nearly alone.


Jürgen Schmidt, API and Extensions.
Well new API's are developed always when new features are implemented. But often requested in the past and now provided is a new awt TreeControl. Many other new API's were introduced. With OO.org 2.3 for example 223 new UNOIDL types are introduced that allow to program certain parts of the office from macros, extensions or even from remote.

Addons were improved, support of more complex toolbars ....

Service provider interface for embedded objects. I think a really useful and powerful SPI that for example allows Java embedded objects that can be activated outplace.

We did a lot of good stuff in the area of programmability. The SDK example ObjectInspector can help developers to get necessary context info of real objects. It allows to browse through an object hierarchy and can of course generate code snippets in Basic, Java and C++ for smaller parts.

A lot of improvements related to the extensions infra structure. Improved extension manager in the office. Online update for extensions, PackageInformationProvider API to get easy access to local package content and many more ...

The extensions repository web site. A really huge step forward to promote extensions for OO.org and allow easy access to new extensions. We now have one and well integrated access point for extensions. Check out the "Get more extensions" link in the extensions manager.

We have released a first version of our OpenOffice.org API plugin for NetBeans. Also a tool for developers to simplify the development with and for OO.org. 4 wizards for client programs, general and specialized components (special service provider interfaces SPI). It support type completion, context sensitive help, ... Version 1.1 should be available next week.

Hand over the Developer's Guide to the documentation. Well we will probably still provide the content but the documentation team has taken over the maintenance. The guide will be published in the wiki (soon) to simplify the contribution. It was often requested by the community and we are now in the situation where we have a suitable solution for the wiki (status will be presented on the conference). And of course the guide was extended with two chapters for extensions and graphical user interfaces.

Many many more stuff.


Matthias Bauer, Writer
I think *the* highlight for the whole project was that ODF officially had become an ISO standard in November (or was it December?) 2006.

The main highlight for the Writer project is the increased community interest and contribution we are seeing and feeling everywhere. Some examples:

• the number of received patches has increased (and we integrate them much faster now ;-))
• on several occasions developers worked together with us to implement new features
• we get a lot of feedback to specifications we have written; some community members also wrote specifications by themselves

Though we have done a lot of work in Writer in the last year I don't see a single particular highlight that should be mentioned. We have been very busy (and still are), but not doing "cool" things. Well, there will always be people that have to do the dirty work. :-)

Thinking a little bit more about it I think that perhaps it is worth mentioning that the Writer team now tries to address highly requested features as much as possible. We had two great Google Summer Of Code projects in areas that belong to those that needed improvements most (notes, text language selection).


Éric Bachard, Philipp Lohmann, Mac Porting Project
About Mac OS X porting project:

• 6 new Domain Developers joined the Macport and thus, the OpenOffice.org community
• Sun MicroSystems provided us 2 dedicated developers at full time
• 2000 cvs commits, a lot of cws, and an Aqua version of OpenOffice.org better at every milestone.

After the fantastic effort the Community and Sun did, the Mac OS X porting project is proud to announce the Aqua version is scheduled for 3.0, and - we hope -, will become a new major port.

Joerg Sievers confirmed we did the first steps in the QA process, and serious things, to integrate the Mac OS X Aqua version will start after OOoCon Barcelona.


Kai Ahrens, Graphics
For the Graphics area, the new Chart implementation (Chart2) is surely a real benefit and of interest for many many people, especially the fact that we now have a solid base on which further improvements are possible, which wasn't the case before.

For the other graphics applicalications like Draw and Impress, there's been a lot of work ongoing regarding modularization of core and UI components to easily develop extensions. Those extensions are currently under development and expected to be released, at least as a prerelease, within the next months.

The currently developed PDF-Import as well as PDF/A support are also highlights among many others.


Christian Lippka, Graphics
In addition to what Kai said about the graphics team, I like to point out that SUN released
its direct x canvas for windows as open source. See Thorstens blog here

http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/windows_display_driver_woes_what

Also the work on modularization will soon spin of some very useful download able extensions. The first
that is soon to come is a minimizer component that can hugely reduce the size of presentation documents by
rescaling images, replacing ole objects and removing hidden slides and many more. Expect a blog entry
about this soon.


Carsten Driesner, Framework
I think the framework project implemented many new features to support a better extension integration into OpenOffice.org.

• Dialog and localization support for extensions
• Merging of items into toolbars and menus
• Support for complex toolbar controls (e.g. comboboxes, editfields, ...) for extensions
• Easy to use message boxes
• Flexible and extensible paths to support:
• Gallery items, Templates and Autotext within extensions


Rafaella Braconi, l10n
The highlights of the last year for the Localization project are:

• contribution: more and more teams are providing translations and are updating the localization of their version on a regular basis. The collaboration on localization efforts between Sun and the native-language teams has enormously increased not only in terms of number of teams contributing but also in terms of volume provided.
• teams expertise: the skills of the team members have improved considerably both in terms of translation quality delivered and in terms of tools and process knowledge.
• project structure: the l10n project has a new co-lead focusing on i18n, Eike Rathke, the irreplaceable and indispensable guidance and support of Pavel Janík and a new lead (myself).


Niklas Nebel, Calc
Some highlights from Calc:

• We started to concentrate usability activities (see http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/improving_calc_usability, http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Calc/To-Dos/Usability lists some issues that have already been resolved).
• There was a successful "Summer of Code" project to integrate R with Calc (http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/R_and_Calc).
• Ongoing: Compatibility improvements (GETPIVOTDATA, array constants, JIS/ASC, ...).
• ...and (John McC addes,) surely a 12857% speed improvement is worth a mention :-)
http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/another_12857_speed_improvement



Frank Peters, Documentation
Documentation is in the middle of a major restructuring since I took over as the co-lead 4 months ago. We started to move to the OOo wiki consolidating the available information sources. Sun open sourced all StarOffice documentation bits inm 2007 to be included in the community set. The Administration Guide is already on the wiki, the Dev Guide with 900+ wiki pages will very soon follow.

For the first time, community members contributed large parts of the help content for the new chart module, first and foremost the German community with Regina Hentschel.

And, there was the successful Template and Clipart contest, sponsored by Worldlabel. And thanks to Jean Weber, who has worked on migrating many docs to the wiki.

Last not least you may consider paying tribute to the longtime documentation project lead Gerry Singleton who unexpectedly passed away in May.


These updates represent but a fraction of the interesting work that has been done this last year. OpenOffice.org has well over a hundred projects and probably more regional efforts. Let me know what you've been doing and I'll add you to this list.

OOoCon Impressions

My reaction after just the first morning in Barcelona, where we held this year's OOoCon was: I want to stay here, live here. And judging from others' reactions, I was not alone. We had reason for our desire: This year's event was held in the grandly gorgeous Universitat de Barcelona, a building and location that offered what we wanted--pleasant rooms, a lovely interior garden, and outside, across the street, cafés and restaurants where we could mingle. Softcatalà, the organizers, did a fine job of making sure we had rooms and excellent food. I can well imagine how much work they had to do, especially given the commencement of classes.

How did the several hundred attendees like this event? From all reports, they greatly enjoyed it. Each of these conferences serves to build community, to undo the differences that distance imposes. Most of us only see each other this one time and learn to communicate via email, IRC, IM--wholly inadequate media for resolving misunderstandings or quickly coming to understandings. This is especially so given that OOo is such an international community with many, many languages spoken, though English remains the language for development and general communication. But for those for whom English is not just the second but fourth language, meeting in person and seeing the real smile not the smiley makes a difference.

My regret: I could attend only a few panels, and I evidently missed a lot of the really good ones. My excuse? I was pressed into meeting after meeting and listened to vendors show their ideas. I don't think I am in wrong to say that this year saw more vendors with clever solutions attend with briefcases in hand. Startups like what we offer, to be sure, and not only startups. Look at IBM, with 1M downloads of its derived product Symphony in just the first week or so: OOo has achieved what is utterly remarkable, a recognizable position in the market, and all without meaningful marketing money being spent. Why is this so remarkable? Well, to sell a commodity like an office suite, some companies must spend astronomical sums, hundreds of millions of dollars each year. We spend nothing. But we have a community, not a consumer base, and that makes all the difference between our incandescent rise and the others' steady descent. The cost of vendor lockin is too high, and freedom is, well, free.