Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

Read mail; boggled at Louis' latest nonsense in the media. Apparently now he is smearing uncertainty about LibreOffice around the place, as well as his normal staple of knocking Novell. To review the stream of incisive insight recently first we get: "Novell .... [is] little more, as far as I can tell, than a proxy for MSFT" - apparently a comforting fiction to cling to until, unfortunately, a couple of weeks later, as the Mono team news breaks, it suddenly doesn't look like the hidden hand of Microsoft lies behind every move we make. Time for a new gambit "Should Novell effectively withdraw -- which I expect -- then what will happen" - yet we're all still here hacking to make LibreOffice better (is that the meaning of 'paralleling' ?). Then - yesterday we have an interview with Brian Proffitt who manages (somehow) to condense his fuzzy logic into a readable narrative.
But first - Who is Louis ? - for those that may never have heard of him, it seems only fair to start with his own words:
Louis Suarez-Potts is the longtime Community Manager and Chair of the Community Council for OpenOffice.org; he has led the OpenOffice.org community since 2000 and currently works for Oracle. The lead and co-lead of several projects and the primary spokesperson and representative of OpenOffice.org ...
While it is very unclear who really made many of the decisions that left such substantial room for improvement in the OO.o project, Louis had some leadership role. The gerrymandered, ineffective governance that entrenched layers of control for a single vendor, was created on his watch. The staggeringly bad infrastructure developers suffered for many years was provided by his original employer (before Sun), and the culture of secret deal making, instead of an open level-playing field, that starved the project of openness, and independence was continued under his watch at Sun.
So perhaps it is useful to take the issues that are raised one by one and beat them about a bit. I've done that in a split out article here. In summary - I hope I don't have to deal with much more of this twaddle over the next months and years - and can get on with building some better software, and fixing bugs for 3.4.
Clarity, call with Kendy & co. status report. Dinner. Rene & the Pregnancy Crisis Centre counsellors over for supervision; disappeared up-stairs to hack. Worked late on mail & code.

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In case it's not painfully obvious: the reflections reflected here are my own; mine, all mine ! and don't reflect the views of Collabora, SUSE, Novell, The Document Foundation, Spaghetti Hurlers (International), or anyone else. It's also important to realise that I'm not in on the Swedish Conspiracy. Occasionally people ask for formal photos for conferences or fun.

Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

2011-05-09: Monday.