Hi project members, an interesting and sometimes turbulent year is closing soon. Many of you will take a break with your families, will meet friends or both. Christmas is the time where many people around the world relax a little bit and charge their batteries for the new year.
The year 2010 is and was a year of changes for many people involved in the OpenOffice.org project. All changes have positive and negative sides. Negative was for sure the split of the community and the reasons for this step and also how it was done. Positive for me was definitely the FOSDEM at the beginning of the year, my trip to the local OOo conference in Brazil and the successful internship program (which i will summarize and present soon) and again the good experience and work with many volunteers. Also positive is that i can still work fulltime on OpenOffice.org and that Oracle has signaled a clear commitment to OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice.org has still a huge potential and is necessary for many people around the world as a free alternative and to ensure education and independence. But costs are not the only advantage of free and open source software and especially bigger companies should sometimes think about this and should not only take. Successful open source projects are most often driven by paid and volunteer developers whereas often the number of paid developers is bigger. Quality has a price and can be guaranteed only if the people and even companies get a return of investment. Well this return can be of course very different ;-) Anyway, in the end is the same as before, the work needs to be done and there is still a lot of work. The changes are also chances for us to improve the collaboration and to look for maybe other new ways of collaboration. The work around the OOo product is so multifaceted that many people even no developers can find there place in the community. So let us look forward and let us focus on the product and our users. I wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy new year. Juergen Member of the OOo CC, API and Extensions Project Lead --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@api.openoffice.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@api.openoffice.org
