Hello;
I just wanted to mention that while it indeed appears that Apache
OpenOffice is over-going a crisis, you can rest assured that in
opensource there is no such thing as death.
We always knew that other projects would take our code and
won't give back, we always knew that there would be a dirty PR
game against us, and to be honest, none of that ever stopped
us from considering the idea of Apache OpenOffice as a TLP in
the ASF and it didn't stop us from doing code that we like.
That obviously hasn't stopped people from downloading the
code either.
To make this absolutely clear: the brand for "Apache OpenOffice"
cannot be assigned to a non-ASF project, it will stay here and we
are not merging with anyone else.
Apache OpenOffice, under an Apache License, will live on as long
as some one finds value in taking the code and use it for whatever
purpose they want. This was what we wanted to do and this is
what is still happening. The liberal licensing has already benefited
other Apache Projects, and that alone was a great reason to have
OpenOffice within the ASF.
This said, there is a crisis, but crisis is actually an opportunity to
change the way things are done. In a project where no one is
getting paid to do anything, crisis doesn't really mean much
of anything.
Concerning the lack of Release Manager, I took the chance to
check the Apache documentation about the role (it appears the
httpd case is as authoritative as it gets):
http://httpd.apache.org/dev/release.html
"The release is coordinated by a Release Manager (hereafter, abbreviated
as RM). Since this job requires trust, coordination of the development
community, and access to subversion, only committers to the project can
be RM. However, there is no set RM, and more than one RM can be active
at a time. Any committer may create a release candidate, provided that
it is based on a releasable (non-vetoed) tag of our current subversion
repository corresponding to the target version number."
Personally I wouldn't have the time to spend on this, and I feel better
writing small pieces of code (I am not as active as I used to but
now we have a new state-of-the-art random number generator
in Calc). I am pretty sure there are capable committers that have
the same time availability issue.
I would suggest that the PMC, as a team, takes over the
Release Management role. Any committer (and the PMC is full of
them) can do the tasks.
IMHO, at this time only reason for making a release is signing
the Windows binaries, so hopefully the task is not too big for
the PMC.
Pedro.
