Hi Pedro,
Am 20.12.11 22:56, schrieb Pedro Giffuni:
Hello Götz;
First of all welcome! Part of the confusion was indeed that we
had not really hear from TOO and it's goals and future plans.
I am relatively new to both OpenOffice and Apache but one of
the things that motivated me to join is that the Apache
License is very open to business. If you can make some profit
or even live out of developing your own product based on Apache
OpenOffice (as we will call it from now on), we are all very
happy about it. As you said there were some mistakes made by
TOO and we appreciate that you have been working on them.
Our development is very open here: we use subversion, the
builds are pretty stable and we have finished the major
changes required to license IP review. We still have
work to do, especially related to rebranding (icons, logos,
etc), dictionary distributions, and perhaps adding some
features that were disabled but things are going pretty
well.
Keep us informed on what you are working and do let us know
if you see opportunities for collaboration as we would
like to avoid duplicated efforts.
Thanks for your welcome and your explanation! My priorities are no
secret: Find (1) funding, (2) customers or (3) sponsors. Unfortunately
collaboration on these topics is tricky: (1) Funding through donations
was planned to give us a starting point, but our donation campaign
caused serious hiccups. I would love to work on a model that is in the
best of interest for the ASF and our plans.
(2) Finding service customers at this point in time is also not
promising as AOO 3.4 is not out yet. So we need to focus on
OpenOffice.org 3.x.x customers. What all customers want is a guarantee
that OpenOffice.org has a bright future. We wanted to give the
long-awaited sign of life and released the requested security update -
unfortunately under a different name - which caused the next trouble. My
hope was, we find an arrangement with the ASF and have a joined
communication. This failed for the Release Candidate. Maybe there is a
chance for the final version.
But even without the approval to use "OpenOffice.org" for this one
#3.3.1 release, it was no option for us not to do it. Customer first! We
are aware of the fact that this caused again confusion but we are not
getting a single dollar for doing nothing. If we don't listen to
customers, we are not allowed to be here.
(3) Finding a new sponsor to continue to work on OOo did work out just
for some of us. I'm sure that the original developer team would still be
pretty much intact if a new sponsor would have jumped in. This annoys
and motivates me at the same time. OOo is such a relevant and important
product, that more developers should work on it. I had other good job
offerings but I strongly believe that OOo/AOO is a good place to be -
with tons of new opportunities and challenges ;-)
I can understand the criticism that we don't communicate enough. But we
also have to focus and dedicate our time on (1), (2) and (3). All our
goals have in common that they are based on OOo and AOO. Looks to me
that there is not much what we can do without making trouble ;-). But
doing nothing is not an option. So we are still trying to find our way.
The good news is that I'm receiving a lot of encourage emails with
"Don't give up!", "Keep going", etc. Let's give it a new start next year.
My best wishes to you and a happy Xmas!
Goetz
Welcome again,
Pedro.
--- Mar 20/12/11, Götz Wohlberg<goetz.wohlb...@googlemail.com> ha scritto:
Da: Götz Wohlberg<goetz.wohlb...@googlemail.com>
Oggetto: About Team OpenOffice.org
A: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org
Data: Martedì 20 dicembre 2011, 11:55
Hi all,
May I introduce myself? My name is Goetz Wohlberg and I
spent the last 16+ years working on OpenOffice.org and it's
commercial derivatives like StarOffice or Oracle Open
Office. At the moment I'm helping Martin and Stefan from
Team OpenOffice.org e.V. to setup a team with full-time
developers to join the Apache OpenOffice podling. My focus
is to create value for customers and to build a successful
commercial business.
I have not read all of the posting here and I'm not a
native English speaker. So I might have missed some topics
or discussions. But my impression is that there is a major
disconnect between the ASF and Team OpenOffice.org. I guess
it's time to be more direct and blunt about our situation.
Please let me try to explain what our ideas are with Team
OpenOffice.org, what we did, what we learned and what our
next steps are.
First off, we are not evil! We don't want to mislead
consumers (although I admit we did)! We are not collecting
donations for our own coffers! We don't have a business
model that is just based on donations! What we plan to do
can be summarized in the following three goals:
1. We want to help existing Oracle customers that they
continue to use
OpenOffice.org
2. We want to make money with support and service for
OpenOffice.org
and Apache OpenOffice
3. We want to be able to sponsor developers working
full-time on
OpenOffice.org and save as much developer
know-how as possible from
the primary contributor Sun/Oracle
To 1:
I'm in contact with a number of customers and I can assure
you, that they are desperately looking for a sign of life
and new releases for OpenOffice.org. Keep in mind that we
released products every 3 month. Customers haven't seen an
OOo release since nearly a year now. I understand that AOO
3.4 is in preparation and on the horizon, but how reliable
is this? The ASF does not have a track record yet for AOO.
Customers and consumers are also asking for support for
their current version -- and this is OpenOffice.org 3.3.0
and earlier. That's the reason why we strongly believe, AOO
3.4 is important, but OOo 3.3.1 is also important. We think
that a maintenance releases for OOo 3.3.0 can help to create
trust in the project and help customers to wait for AOO
3.4.
To 2:
Important part of our business model is to sell support and
service contracts to OpenOffice.org and -- in the future --
Apache OpenOffice customers. With the withdrawal of the main
sponsor Oracle there are not many companies on this planet
doing so. We believe that this is quite a cool unique
selling point (USP). Unfortunately decision-making in the
Enterprise about OOo support contracts normally takes around
6 to 9 month. We don't have that reach. So we need to close
this gap until we see service revenue coming in.
To 3:
Here is a quote from a kind user who is trying to help us
to make our case. I think this is a pretty good explanation
of our situation: "Oracle used to pay our salaries to work
on OpenOffice,org, but since Oracle turned OpenOffice.org
over to the Apache Foundation, it no longer pays us. We were
primary contributors to OpenOffice.org, we love it, and we
want to be able to work on it full-time. Unless a large
company or government hires us to do this (wink, wink,
nudge, nudge), we are trying to support ourselves via
donations -- until we are ready to sell service contracts.
Donations to the Apache Foundation, while a nice thing to
do, can not be used for this purpose, so you will need to
donate to Team OpenOffice.org as a separate entity."
And collecting donations is something -- as you know --
Team OpenOffice.org always did! Donations are very important
for us in this phase to close the gap until we see service
revenue coming in. And there are also very successful
companies like the Wikimedia Foundation that are based on
donations. Therefore I authorized the donation campaign
"Save OpenOffice.org" - and I want to apologize for that! It
was a mistake because I didn't realize that at the same time
this implies that OpenOffice.org is not doing well at the
ASF. Believe me or not, it was not my intend to bring
discredit upon the Apache OpenOffice project.
What are our next steps though? We are of course accepting
the ASF ownership of the OpenOffice.org trademark. As we
worked since 2003 smoothly together with Sun and Oracle, we
were surprised to see that non-commercial Apache is seeing
us as a troublemaker. Btw, Team OpenOffice.org is also
non-commercial.
We will not stop asking for donations to sponsor
developers! Please take your time to understand what we are
asking for. We are asking for money to help developing OOo!
We are not asking to donate for the ASF or OOo! If our
communication on this topic is not clear enough, we'll fix
it! Do you see the difference? Again, we want full-time
developers working on the project and contributing their
work to the Apache OpenOffice podling -- something the ASF
can't do! How bad is this? Without full-time developers our
business model won't fly.
We will not stop telling the world that we were the primary
contributors and inventors of OpenOffice.org. The
development team in Hamburg created it -- with the help of
the OpenOffice.org community -- and is happy to continue
developing it. I don't think that this is confusing users.
It's the truth. The ASF should use this as a weapon not as a
threat. We will also defend ourselves against malicious
gossip or suspicion -- same like the ASF does. So please
stop the own-coffers-thing.
As service and support is part of our business model, we
are listening to OpenOffice.org Enterprise users and
customers. They asked us for a maintenance release for
OpenOffice.org 3.3.0 due to the security issues -- and we
will deliver! This release will carry a name that does not
conflict with the OpenOffice.org trademark. Using another
name is clearly not the best solution for all of us: users
and customers, the ASF and Team OpenOffice.org. This should
be motivation enough to work on a better solution.
Just one more paragraph with my personal thoughts: We
recognized our mistakes! Reason for the mistake was to get
donations to hire full-time developers. We are also working
hard on other ideas to get funding but we are not there yet!
We want to be a committer to the Apache OpenOffice podling
and we basically share the same goals. We inserted a very
prominent link to the ASF on our website (see the box "Home
of the Development Project" on teamopenoffice.org). I hope
that this email does not have a negative impact on our
chance to establish a cooperative relationship between Team
OpenOffice.org and the Apache OpenOffice project. Does it?
We are not evil!
Thanks,
Goetz
