I've seen several posts asking about how the core OOo development project will relate to the other activities such as user forums, translations, releases, language projects, etc. I thought it would be good to have a single thread to discuss the general issues.
As many of us know, with OpenOffice.org under Sun/Oracle, there was a widespread community of semi-autonomous projects, under the openoffice.org"umbrella". One way to divide this is by the "development" functions, by which I mean the things that lead directly to the artifacts that were part of the official OOo releases: - programmers, including localization and accessibility - testers - product documentation - UI design - content designers for templates, samples, etc. - build/release management I think that it will be ideal to get all volunteers working in this set of functions into the same Apache OpenOffice.org project, under the same license, and working together. And then there are other functions that helped promote and support the releases and the users who adopted the releases: - marketing - support forums - event organizers - and many other similar functions I think these groups are welcome to join the Apache project, but they would need to consider the trade-offs. If they have autonomy now, run their own servers, elect or appoint their own leaders, etc., then moving to Apache means merging their structures into the Apache project, mapping their roles into contributor/committer/PMC member roles, adopting their web sites to the Apache infrastructure, working openly on the Apache mailing lists, allowing anyone to work on it, as well as allowing anyone to review and comment on their work. In other words, they give up some control and in return have a potentially larger group of people to help them. But let's be honest. If the Romanian language project decided to work entirely in Apache on their translations, the chances are that very few existing Apache members would be of much assistance to them, as a volunteer or as a reviewer. So I'm not seeing a compelling benefit for all of the language projects to join Apache. But I could see something like this: - Language projects remain autonomous, but agree to put a compatible license on all of their work, e.g., the Apache 2.0 license - Each language project appoints one of their members to join the Apache OOo list, so we can stay coordinated. - Ideally, there will be one or more volunteers from the language projects who get more involved, in larger localization issues, and via their feedback and patches, ensure that OOo continues to meet the needs of a international audience. These volunteers would likely then be voted in as committers and PMC members. For marketing, user forums, event organizers, etc., I can easily see these being done in the Apache project, to the extent they are "international" in scope. But It isn't clear how in an Apache project we would coordinate a group that, for example, was only interested in planning marketing, support and events for Romanian OOo users. I'd be interested in other views on this. In particular, if we went down the other road, and assimilated all language projects into Apache, how does the process of lose consensus and meritocracy work if project members are segregated into mailing lists where discussions occur in, e,g., Romanian. So in summary, I think the different function groups need to consider the costs and benefits of adapting to an Apache project model, which would include: - Working openly on the Apache mailing lists, allowing anyone to participate and allowing anyone to review your work, and potentially even veto it. - Moving servers and websites onto Apache infrastructure - Giving up titles from other organizations and working in the Apache project meritocracy - Agreeing that your product contributions will be available under Apache 2.0 license -Rob
