Hi, let me introduce myself a little bit more as promised in my voting email ;-)
My name is Juergen Schmidt (jsc) and i work on the project since 1997, started at StarDivision -> Sun -> Oracle where i am still employed today. But i am here as individual and everything i will do and say here is based on my very own opinion and motivation. I will also do not speak for Oracle in any way and i am here only to help and to bring OpenOffice.org forward. At the beginning i was deeply involved in the development of UNO the underlying component middleware technology and focused later more and more on the general programmability features. As the API and Extensions project lead i always tried to bring these features forward. I always had the vision of a component based architecture where you have well defined functional blocks (components) that build altogether a complete product. In an ideally world you would be able to define a feature set, let's say you need a writer component only, and some kind of tooling would package all necessary fine grained components that builds all together a full featured writer editor. Ok i know that is very highlevel but i hope the idea becomes a little bit more clear. Anyway in the existing code base we are of course far away of such an architecture because it's more complex and the modularization that would be necessary is not in place yet. But maybe we can achieve it in the future or can at least move forward in this direction. Make things easier reusable and also easier exchangeable for example if a better implementation becomes available ... I worked also on tooling and documentation that helps to develop with and for OpenOffice.org (SDK, DevGuide, NetBeans Extension plugin, ...). Compared to another proprietary office suite we have a lot of space for improvements here to make it easier for end users and developers to develop their own automation workflows, solutions or to develop connectors in other business critical applications. Yes the success of OpenOffice.org should be in the business world and not only in the private sector. A successful future of the OpenOffice.org project needs sponsors and they come probably not from the private sector only. As some kind of "OOo Evangelist" i have spread and shared my knowledge around the API and Extensions development on many conferences all over the world (e.g. JavaOne, FISL, FOSS.IN, FOSDEM, LinuxTag,...) . Community work was one part of my daily work and also of my private spare time.The split of the community last year was a dark moment in the history of OOo and i hope that over time we will have again one community working all together on the same goal. I am also a member of the OOo community council and besides the general work there i focused on the organization of an internship program (2010) which is comparable to the well known GSOC. We hadn't the same budget as Google but we were able to run at least 6 projects with success. That should be enough for the moment and if you have any further question that is related to my person or to my work as a OOo community member feel free to ask me. I hope this can be the beginning of a new great project where "political" issues becomes more and more unimportant in the future. Kind regards Juergen
