That's really a great news! I've forward this message to our local community. ^_*'
On 2011/07/14 06:00, Rob Weir said: > I'm sending this with my IBM "hat". > > I'm going to be speaking at the ODF Plugfest in Berlin Friday > afternoon, and will be making some announcements. I wanted you to > hear this first, before anyone else knows. > > You know about IBM Lotus Symphony, our free (as in beer) product which > is based on OOo. We're doing well with it, I think. Along with > various numerous interop, performance enhancements and functional/bug > fixes, we've done some significant work in the accessibility and user > interface in general. If you saw recently, PC Magazine gave Symphony > 3.0 its "Editors' Choice Award" [1]. In the review they praised the > "interface that's been tweaked by IBM to make it by far the > user-friendliest no-cost productivity suite, and one's that's friendly > enough to rival the spacious and informative interface that Microsoft > created for Office 2010 and that Apple created for iWork '09." So the > UI enhancements are getting some notice. > > However, we at IBM have not been exemplary community members when it > came to OpenOffice.org. This wasn't necessarily by design, but for > various reasons, that was the effect. Yes, we participated in various > community councils, and sponsored conferences and worked together on > standards. But when it came down to the code, we maintained Symphony > essentially as a fork, and although we occasionally contributed code > back, we did not do this well, or often. > > We'd like to make some changes in how we do things, and the fresh > start at Apache is a good opportunity for this. > > We will be doing the following: > > First, we're going to contribute the standalone version of Lotus > Symphony to the Apache OpenOffice.org project, under the Apache 2.0 > license. We'll also work with project members to prioritize which > pieces make sense to integrate into OpenOffice. For example, we've > already done a lot of work with replacing GPL/LPGL dependencies. > Using the Symphony code could help accelerate that work and get us to > an AOOo release faster. We've already converted the help files to > DITA, which could help accelerate that work, if we chose to go in that > direction. > > Aside from the work that would help accelerate getting AOOo to our > first release, we've also added other features that I think we should > consider merging in. For example, the IAccessible2 work which helps > Symphony work better with assistive technology. I know an older > version of this work sits in an OOo CWS someplace, but it will be > easier to integrate that work if we start with our latest code. We've > also added VBA macro support, which is great for MS Office interop. > > Also, as the PC Magazine review notes, we've done some really good UI > work. I invite you to download Symphony [2] and take a closer look at > this. Yes, it is different from what OOo has today. And a move of > that magnitude has an impact on documentation and translations as > well. But the feedback we've received from customers and reviewers > is very positive. Do we integrate parts of the Symphony UI? That is > something for the project to discuss and decide on. > > Finally, we will be proposing [3] a new incubation project at Apache, > for the ODF Toolkit. These Java libraries enable new kinds of > lightweight document processing applications. We think this would > work well as an Apache project, and we look forward to moving that > into incubation and developing that complementary project forward. > > So that's essentially what I'll be announcing on Friday. The above > contributions will occur over the next couple of months, starting with > the ODF Toolkit. I hope you see the exciting possibilities as much as > I do. > > Regards, > > -Rob > > > > [1] http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2387439,00.asp > > [2] http://symphony.lotus.com/ > > [3] http://odftoolkit.org/projects/odftoolkit/pages/ApacheProposal -- Best regards, imacat ^_*' <ima...@mail.imacat.idv.tw> PGP Key http://www.imacat.idv.tw/me/pgpkey.asc <<Woman's Voice>> News: http://www.wov.idv.tw/ Tavern IMACAT's http://www.imacat.idv.tw/ Woman in FOSS in Taiwan http://wofoss.blogspot.com/ OpenOffice.org http://www.openoffice.org/ EducOO/OOo4Kids Taiwan http://www.educoo.tw/
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