Hi, i am not really new here and be one of the initial committers but i would take the opportunity to let you know that i got the chance to work fulltime on the project in the future as an IBM employee.
After 14 years with Sun and Oracle and working on the OOo project since the beginning i was affected by the announcement of Oracle earlier this year in several ways. The project where i has spent a lot of work and energy into it was dropped in a somewhat unclear future including the team in HH. And i had to confess that i felt in some kind of a hole and thought it would be time for a longer break. But with the grant of the source code to the Apache foundation it rose at least the chance for the project to continue and become an independent project under the well accepted Apache foundation. I thought ok, Apache not TDF or any other institution but it's Oracles decision and it's now up to the community to continue the project. That was the reason why i joined the AOO project early without knowing what i will do tomorrow from a professional perspective. I spent a lot of time in the summer to relax and thinking about the future of the project, my occupational career etc. In the end i accepted the offerig by IBM and i am really happy that i can now continue the work on the project. I will focus on making the project Apache conform first and to make a binary release available asap. I will help by the integration of changes made for Symphony that will definitely bring the project forward (e.g. IAccessiblity2) and of course i will continue with all the other work that i have done in the past for the project. There are a lot of things to do where we need a lot of volunteers helping the project to grow in the future. I really hope that over time we can reunify the 2 projects AOO and LibreOffice from a technical perspective and can share at least a common code base. From my point of view the reasons for the fork are not longer valid and it should be possible to continue one project, one office together. That doesn't mean that the TDF should stop their work, i really respect it and they achieved a lot in the short time. But from a technical perspective it doesn't make sense to split the resources in 2 groups working on more or less the same thing. It is still early enough to reunify the code base and use the well known brand OpenOffice for a binary release. It would be the best choice for our users. The good thing at Apache is that all contributors are more or less equal and it is important what they do. A good chance for all who simply want to bring the project forward without too much politic in the background. The focus should be our users and an easy to use office productivity suite for all. Juergen
