On Oct 14, 2011, at 1:04 PM, Donald Whytock <dwhyt...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 14, 2011 at 12:59 PM, Dennis E. Hamilton > <dennis.hamil...@acm.org> wrote: >> I've read through the German materials at the site and, while Google >> Translator does stumble, the gist of it is pretty clear. This has all the >> appearance of an over-the-top plea to fund 4 guys to save OpenOffice.org >> from death-by-abandonment. To further the confusion, the download link for >> OpenOffice.org 3.3 is into <http://download.openoffice.org>. The "Thank you >> for your contribution" after a Paypal donation (they have my 5 Euro) is also >> a page on http://openoffice.org. > > Is it even four guys? They list five title-related email addresses > and give the same phone number five times. If I didn't know Team OO > existed before now I'd wonder if someone had just built a site from > random images. Team OpenOffice.org is a German non-profit started by some people in the Hamburg office back when OO.o was newly open-sourced to collect and handle monies to support community events. Sun employees started it "extra" to their day jobs, and many sources sent it money (including individuals and companies such as IBM). Sun didn't want to collect / handle such donations directly, and the Hamburg guys needed a way to pay for conferences, etc. Much if their dispersement has historically been to individual community members in support of travel to OOo conferences. Team OpenOffice.org did undertake and secure the global registration of the OpenOffice.org trademark because Sun was initially content to leave it unregistered since first use in the US provides some protection, but after Team OpenOffice.org secured the mark legally they were asked to transfer it to Sun and did so...they were all Sun employees afterall. "They" are currently five of the engineers who have been working on OpenOffice for much of their lives (20+ years in more than one case). This code is their baby, and for better or worse they wish to continue to produce a product the way they think it should be done. They have expressed interest in seeing AOO.o become a viable upstream. I think what's happening now is reporters trying to make sense of a complicated story with many factions. It probably isn't a coincidence that LibreOffice Con is this weekend and "we're the real deal" messaging is coming from LO and TOOo is concerned about dilution of the OOo brand... My $.02 Danese
