OpenOffice.org Success: Homesteading the OpenOffice.org Noosphere
Measuring the true Success of OpenOffice.org – Michael Meeks wrote a long post about OpenOffice.org success, mostly from a development point of view. Being Michael a Novell’s employee his perspective might be considered biased, but I totally agree with his recipe:
# Kill the ossified, paralysed and gerrymandered political system in OO.o. Instead put the developers (all of them), and those actively contributing into the driving seat. This in turn should help to kill the many horribly demotivating and dysfunctional process steps currently used to stop code from getting included, and should help to attract volunteers. Once they are attracted and active, listen to them without patronizing.
- Distance the project from Sun: perhaps less branding, certainly less top-down control, reduce the requirement to ‘share’ all your rights over to Sun before you can contribute to the project. Better still, share ownership of the code with a non-profit foundation to guarantee stability and an independent future for the code-base.
PLIO’s president Davide Dozza formerly expressed similar concerns, and I believe that Sun should create a foundation to share R&D costs. As a ‘collateral effect’ Sun saving resources might spend more time and effort easing medium to large companies’ migrations, eventually.
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