[HLUG] Fwd: [ooo-announce] OpenOffice.org Community announces The Document Foundation

Tue Sep 28 12:36:12 UTC 2010

On 28 September 2010 08:49, Paul Stenning <paul at sp-tech.co.uk> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I received this earlier today.
>
> From the latest Linux Format there appears to be some issues with Oracle
> and Open Source so I guess a break-away or separation of OpenOffice from
> Oracle was inevitable.
>
> Paul
>

Yes, I received this too. I spoke to Chris Halls (who is mentioned in the
mail itself), who implied that many of the the OOo devs who Sun employed
(now owned by Oracle), aren't working on OOo anymore. He also said that the
number is shrinking all the time so the community contributor count was
already at a similar number to the oracle devs.

Novell are still majorly involved, and are keener to get new work included
in OOo than Sun were.

Will be interesting to see how this pans out, but there are some really big
names on the mail, including Mark Shuttleworth, Redhat and Chris diBona at
Google, so it seems to have a good head start.

Julian

>
>
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: [ooo-announce] OpenOffice.org Community announces The Document
> Foundation
> Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2010 08:58:32 +0200
> From: The Document Foundation <info at documentfoundation.org>
> Reply-To: announce at openoffice.org
> Organisation: The Document Foundation
> To: announce at openoffice.org
>
> OpenOffice.org Community announces The Document Foundation
>
> The community of volunteers developing and promoting OpenOffice.org sets up
> an independent Foundation to drive the further growth of the project
>
> The Internet, September 28, 2010 - The community of volunteers who develop
> and promote OpenOffice.org, the leading free office software, announce a
> major change in the project’s structure. After ten years’ successful growth
> with Sun Microsystems as founding and principle sponsor, the project
> launches an independent foundation called "The Document Foundation", to
> fulfil the promise of independence written in the original charter.
>
> The Foundation will be the cornerstone of a new ecosystem where individuals
> and organisations can contribute to and benefit from the availability of a
> truly free office suite. It will generate increased competition and choice
> for the benefit of  customers and drive innovation in the office suite
> market. From now on, the OpenOffice.org community will be known as "The
> Document Foundation".
>
> Oracle, who acquired OpenOffice.org assets as a result of its acquisition
> of Sun Microsystems, has been invited to become a member of the new
> Foundation, and donate the brand the community has grown during the past ten
> years. Pending this decision, the brand "LibreOffice" has been chosen for
> the software going forward.
>
> The Document Foundation is the result of a collective effort by leading
> independent members of the OpenOffice.org community, including several
> project leads and key members of the Community Council. It will be led
> initially by a Steering Committee of developers and national language
> projects managers. The Foundation aims to lower the barrier of adoption for
> both users and developers, to make LibreOffice the most accessible office
> suite ever.
>
> The Foundation will coordinate and oversee the development of LibreOffice,
> which is available in beta version at the placeholder site:
> http://www.libreoffice.org. Developers are invited to join the project and
> contribute to the code in the new friendly and open environment, to shape
> the future of office productivity suites alongside contributors who
> translate, test, document, support, and promote the software.
>
> Speaking for the group of volunteers, Sophie Gautier - a veteran of the
> community and the former maintainer of the French speaking language project
> - has declared: "We believe that the Foundation is a key step for the
> evolution of the free office suite, as it liberates the development of the
> code and the evolution of the project from the constraints represented by
> the commercial interests of a single company. Free software advocates around
> the world have the extraordinary opportunity of joining the group of
> founding members today, to write a completely new chapter in the history of
> FLOSS".
>
> FSF President Richard Stallman welcomed LibreOffice release and it's stated
> policy of only recommending free software. "I'm very pleased that the
> Document Foundation will not recommend nonfree add-ons, since they are the
> main freedom problem of the current OpenOffice.org. I hope that the
> LibreOffice developers and the Oracle-employed developers of OpenOffice will
> be able to cooperate on development of the body of the code".
>
> "The Document Foundation supports the Open Document Format, and is keen to
> work at OASIS to the next evolution of the ISO standard", says Charles
> Schulz, member of the Community Council and lead of the Native Language
> Confederation. "The Document Foundation brings to the table the point of
> view of developers, supporters and users, and this might accelerate the
> adoption process of ODF at government and enterprise level".
>
> Chris DiBona, Open Source Programs Manager at Google, Inc., has commented:
> "The creation of The Document Foundation is a great step forward in
> encouraging further development of open source office suites. Having a level
> playing field for all contributors is fundamental in creating a broad and
> active community around an open source software project. Google is proud to
> be a supporter of The Document Foundation and participate in the project".
>
> "Viva la LibreOffice", said Guy Lunardi, product management Director at
> Novell. "We look forward to working with the Document Foundation to help
> develop a solid open source document software offering. Ultimately, we
> envision LibreOffice do for the office productivity market what Mozilla
> Firefox has done for browsers".
>
> Jan Wildeboer, EMEA Open Source Affairs at Red Hat, has commented: "All
> over the world, users, companies and governments are moving to innovative
> technology solutions based on Open Standards.  Red Hat is proud to join this
> effort".
>
> Mark Shuttleworth, founder and major shareholder of Canonical, the makers
> of Ubuntu, has declared: "Office productivity software is a critical
> component of the free software desktop, and the Ubuntu Project will be
> pleased to ship LibreOffice from The Document Foundation in future releases
> of Ubuntu. The Document Foundation's stewardship of LibreOffice provides
> Ubuntu developers an effective forum for collaboration around the code that
> makes Ubuntu an effective solution for the desktop in office environments".
>
> "The Open Source Initiative has observed a trend back towards open
> collaborative communities for open source software", said Simon Phipps, a
> Director of the Open Source Initiative. "We welcome The Document Foundation
> initiative and look forward to the innovation it is able to drive with a
> truly open community gathered around a free software commons, in the spirit
> of the best of open source software".
>
> "We welcome the LibreOffice project to the free software community as we
> believe there is a great opportunity for them to enrich the free desktop
> experience." says Stormy Peters, Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation.
>  "Over the years the GNOME community has been supportive of OpenOffice
> together with applications in the GNOME Office suite, such as Gnumeric,
> GnuCash and Abiword. As LibreOffice joins the free software community, we
> believe that free desktop users will benefit from a rich set of choices."
>
> Patrick Luby, Chief Engineer of NeoOffice says "I am happy to see a new,
> independent LibreOffice foundation to continue creating an office suite with
> enhanced features, pushing OpenOffice.org in new, exciting directions". Ed
> Peterlin, Chief Visionary at NeoOffice says "I am excited we will be able to
> continue bringing excellent features from LibreOffice to the Mac platform.
> In the future I also hope to extend our web based collaboration tools to
> support LibreOffice users on all platforms".
>
> Chris Halls, UK Managing Director of Credativ, an independent consulting
> and services company specialising in the development, implementation and
> support of open source solutions: "Welcomes the foundation as an opportunity
> to provide a new focus for the community contributors and allow them to move
> the project forward together. In our business, we support thousands of
> office desktops in many different environments. It is  vital that the
> feedback and code that we can contribute as part of our day to day work can
> flow easily into the project".
>
> "The creation of The Document Foundation is in line with the vision
> BrOffice.org - Projeto Brasil has for the Brazilian OpenOffice.org
> community. Our country already has a large investment in the Open Document
> Format and the software tools fully suporting it. BrOffice.org and The
> Document Foundation share the same values and objectives and we are more
> than happy to be part of it.”, says Claudio Filho, Chairman of the
> BrOffice.org NGO of Brazil.
>
> The Norwegian foundation "Åpne kontorprogram på norsk" ("Open Office Suites
> In Norwegian") is responsible for the Norwegian translation of
> OpenOffice.org, and for promoting OpenOffice.org in Norway. So far the
> Norwegian project has been administered and financed mainly by counties and
> municipalities, but recently the foundation has started a process for
> getting commercial companies more actively involved. We realise the need for
> a more substantial commercial participation to establish a long-term
> sustainable project. Our foundation notes that the other Nordic countries, a
> majority of the European countries, as well as a range of worldwide big
> companies like Google, Novell, Canonical and Red Hat are now cooperating
> with The Document Foundation. We believe this is the right way forward also
> for Norway. A cooperation with The Document Foundation will make it easier
> to create more innovative and user-friendly solutions integrated with the
> LibreOffice suite. Eliminating license barriers and obtaining easy access to
> source code and standards will facilitate further development of related and
> integrated surrounding products.
>
> Additional information, including the mission, are available on the web
> site of The Document Foundation: http://www.documentfoundation.org
> Biographies and pictures of the founding members of The Document Foundation
> are available here: http://www.documentfoundation.org/foundation/
> There is a specific page for people interested in contributing to the
> development of the code: http://www.documentfoundation.org/contribution/
>
> The Document Foundation has a Twitter account at
> http://twitter.com/docufoundation and an Identi.ca account at
> http://identi.ca/docufoundation
>
> The announcements mailing list is at
> announce+subscribe at documentfoundation.org<announce%2Bsubscribe at documentfoundation.org>
> The discussion mailing list is at discuss+subscribe at documentfoundation.org<discuss%2Bsubscribe at documentfoundation.org>
> The IRC channel is #documentfoundation at irc.freenode.net
>
> The Document Foundation
>
> The Document Foundation is an independent self-governing democratic
> Foundation created by leading members of the OpenOffice.org Community. It
> continues to build on the Foundation of ten years' dedicated work by the
> OpenOffice.org community, and was created in the belief that an independent
> Foundation is the best fit to the Community's core values of openness,
> transparency, and valuing people for their contribution. It is open to any
> individual who agrees with our core values and contributes to our
> activities, and welcomes corporate participation, e.g. by sponsoring
> individuals to work as equals alongside other contributors in the community.
>
> Media Contacts
>
> Florian Effenberger (Germany)
> Phone: +49 8341 99660880
> Mobile: +49 151 14424108
> Skype: floeff
> E-mail: floeff at documentfoundation.org
>
> Olivier Hallot (Brazil)
> Mobile: +55 21 88228812
> E-mail: olivier.hallot at documentfoundation.org
>
> Charles H. Schulz (France)
> Mobile: +33 6 98655424
> E-mail: charles.schulz at documentfoundation.org
>
> Italo Vignoli (Italy)
> Mobile: +39 348 5653829
> E-mail: italo.vignoli at documentfoundation.org
>
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