Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

Up early, breakfast, somehow missed an 8am meeting; Encouraging sync with Ralf. Insightful article from Brian on the IBM move, and an even more insightful comment from Marbux doing some of the spade-work on expanding the history. Marbux is right - this has all happened before: IBM trying to fork, based on an old code-base (under a non-copy-left license), against the existing developer community's wishes as/when the non-copy-left license was withdrawn last time. Nice to have that Doug Heintzman interview from 2007:
[three+ years ago]: IBM's contributions will include 35 dedicated programmers as well as editing, accessibility, and other code ... We've been investing in creating many complementary things in Notes that aren't in the core OpenOffice code, such as the SmartScreen filters and iAccessibility2 ...
While in fact I applaud IBM's lack of engagement with the (highly unreasonable) Sun regime that was OO.o - it is interesting to note the exaggerated claims of dedicated developer numbers never really materialised (or perhaps there was just an effectiveness problem). Also IAccessible2 integration is still one of the (great) promised distinctive new features they plan to finally contribute for Apache Office (much improving accessibility for the impaired on Windows, analagous to SUSE & Sun's integrated work on atk integration for Linux - an unfortunate feature to politic with). The code was re-promised to the community in 2008 in an IBM keynote, and eventually dumped vs. a very, very obsolete branch (1.1.5) and left; and is still not integrated to this day, hence re-appearing as a new value-add. Of course times change, and strategies morph and some commitments are un-sustainable, no doubt it happens to us all.
Poked at mail, wrote up some thoughts on the 3.4.0 release, and the encouraging progress there; with so much good work by so many, I wanted to highlight some of the behind-the-scenes work too.
Are the LibreOffice statistics just made up ?
I was amused last night with Rob's attempt to dispute the statistics we publish, he was promoting the idea that LibreOffice had only 54 developers in the last six months, most of them Novell. It seems (on a benign assumption) that this is likely to stem from a rather simple error, counting just 'bootstrap'. Admittedly we do the rather evil thing of downloading more code when you run 'make' (can be forced with ./download after configure) so perhaps understandable. It raises the question of how we could possibly publish graphs with a straight face that show the opposite. I quickly re-generated the numbers last night and posted them. Of course we all make mistakes, perhaps we have - we use Jonathan Corbett (and GregKH's) gitdm which is quite well established, and all the code and patches are published. They show for the last six months:
```
Employers with the most hackers (total 214)
(Unknown)                  138 (64.5%)
Oracle                      45 (21.0%)
Novell                      18 (8.4%)
Known contributors           7 (3.3%)
Canonical                    4 (1.9%)
Redhat                       2 (0.9%)
```
Of course - the numbers show nothing about volume of contribution, only discrete numbers of affiliated contributors: so RedHat did a much larger volume of work than Canonical - who donated a more diverse set of changes. Cue argument about the usefulness of lots of volunteers contributing small changes (personally I love and want to encourage that - I love 'Unknown' affiliated hackers they sound spicy and interesting).
Is TDF going to 'fall over in the next storm' ?
A great allegation from Rob Weir:
I'd be absolutely giddy with joy if LibreOffice developers would come over to Apache and run their project under the Apache 2.0 license under the Apache process. I'd even be open to calling it "LibreOffice". But this is much more an issue of organizational capabilities than it is the rather narrow gulf between the current OpenOffice and LibreOffice source codes. I want an organization that will last, not something that will fall over in the next storm.

Ignoring the red-herring about naming; the question is: is Apache really that vast, stable, storm-proofed and well funded as an organisation ?

First I should say, that I think the Apache governance rocks in many ways, and this is no critique of them. They are a voluntary organisation, and they kick some serious ass. More amazingly than that they achieve so much on a fairly limited budget If I read it right:
```
Attachment AE: Proposed 2010-2011 Budget

ASF budget for FY May 1 2010 - Apr 30 2011
-------------------
...
INCOME Total                : $541,200.00
```
With the majority of that coming from the sponsorship program. This makes me wonder, whether financially and structurally they are really playing in a different league to TDF or whether volunteer Free Software projects like this, doing amazing things on a shoe-string are the norm. Clearly age, experience, and being incorporated are helpful predictors of future stability. Another example would be GNOME's financials bringing in $187,000 last year, KDE ev reports are in German, but Die Finanzsituation im Kalenderjahr 2008: Einnahmen: 235.406,15 EUR seems of a similar magnitude. Clearly, financially TDF's raising of Eur 100k in a couple of months (from a mix of generous donors), seems quite adequate to finance the project. My conclusion - There is no need for TDF to fall over in any storm - not even a man-made one. But of course, we are eager for more contributors, members and stability.
One of the nice things about the Attachmate acquisition is being part of SUSE; working with management with a deeply informed grasp of Free Software, the importance of the community, and how working well with them will always, in the end, be best for our customers; anyhow enough raving - here is our SUSE Perspective on Oracle's Contribution of OpenOffice.org to Apache.

My content in this blog and associated images / data under images/ and data/ directories are (usually) created by me and (unless obviously labelled otherwise) are licensed under the public domain, and/or if that doesn't float your boat a CC0 license. I encourage linking back (of course) to help people decide for themselves, in context, in the battle for ideas, and I love fixes / improvements / corrections by private mail.

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

2011-06-03: Friday.

Are the LibreOffice statistics just made up ?

Is TDF going to 'fall over in the next storm' ?