Luminary, Executive and Community Quotes
May 1, 2002
"Sun recognizes that shared innovation - not development in isolation - is the key to helping our customers solve problems and putting tools in the hands of these innovators who can create real-world solutions. Through the open source process and the donation of the StarOffice source code, OpenOffice.org community members were able to enhance and broaden availability of a viable office productivity suite in OpenOffice.org 1.0 that will offers users around the world a choice in office productivity."
-- said Pat Sueltz, executive vice president, Software Systems Group, Sun Microsystems.
"Sun is committed to the community and the synchronicity between future OpenOffice.org and StarOffice releases. Our developers develop directly into the OpenOffice.org code base, from which we build StarOffice. That's what is so great about OpenOffice.org - people can really innovate by taking the source code and doing something to feed a niche market, supplying a port to a platform or a language not already supported."
-- Mike Rogers, vice president and general manger of desktop and office productivity at Sun Microsystems
"OpenOffice.org may be the most important open source project right now. Because people will try it and see they can get everyday work done without giving more money to Microsoft, they'll see -- in a low-risk way -- that open source software can work for them and be an even better solution."
-- Miguel de Icaza, founder of the GNOME project.
"OpenOffice.org 1.0 may be the single best hope for consumers fed-up with Microsoft's desktop monopoly. With Sun moving to a full service and support business model for StarOffice software, users around the globe will continue to have a free office productivity software tool through the OpenOffice.org open source community."
-- Eric Raymond, co-founder of the Open Source Initiative (OSI).
"When OpenOffice.org was released, it was a tremendous amount of code with a very deep history, and thus we knew it would take a lot of time and effort to reach a critical mass of community participation. The project has now attracted a significant amount of outside involvement, some of it in pretty interesting areas like marketing and quality assurance. With the release of 1.0, it's clear those efforts are bearing real fruit. Congratulations to the community -- and to Sun -- for making this happen."
-- Brian Behlendorf, CTO and co-founder, CollabNet.
"I am grateful to Sun for making a powerful office suite available as Free Software for Free operating systems such as GNU/Linux."
-- Richard Stallman, founder, Software Freedom Foundation.
"There are many important roles that volunteer developers can play to shape the future functionality of OpenOffice.org (OOo) so if you are looking for someplace to contribute, OOo can use you,"
-- Kevin Hendricks, a key contributor to the OpenOffice.org community since its inception nearly two years ago. Hendricks has lead volunteer development teams for both the OpenOffice.org 1.0 spellchecker and PPC Linux port projects.
"In the spirit of community, OpenOffice.org recently hosted a three-day translation event in Hungary in which more than 100 volunteers translated the OpenOffice.org 1.0 code into Hungarian. The Community provides innovation not only at the code level, but at the community level as well", said Sam Hiser, the co-project lead for the OpenOffice.org marketing team. "The Hungarian event was a community effort in the truest sense of the word."
-- Sam Hiser, co-project lead - OpenOffice.org marketing project, and CIO of ReelAmerica, Inc.
"Sun's tangible commitments to OpenOffice.org in terms of the code contribution, financial support, engineering and marketing resources has enabled the community to flourish. And, inturn community contributions have lead to two great products - OpenOffice.org 1.0 and the StarOffice 6.0 software sharing the same code base, targetting the different needs of users. This clearly shows that the open source model for collaborative software development really works !
"As the Community Manager of the OpenOffice.org project, sometimes it is hard being a mediator of the creative tension between the community and corporation as OpenOffice.org, the project, evolves to another degree of maturity. It has been extremly energising seeing open source software development working. Suddenly OpenOffice.org is available in over 21 languages and across platforms that we didnt imagine being in the middle of. To engage with volunteers from all over the globe, as they come together as a community in areas that they identified as needing attention has resulted in revolutionary momentum and a global product launch second to none for OpenOffice.org 1.0."
-- Zaheda Bhorat, Community Manager, OpenOffice.org, Sun Microsystems.
"As the senior Community Manager of OpenOffice.org (since October 2000), it is perhaps fitting that I have the last word. And that's to say: Thanks. We owe this release to the OpenOffice.org community. Why? OpenOffice.org 1.0 is not just about the product; it is about the collaborative process. What the OpenOffice.org Project has shown, stunningly, is that Linus Torvalds' conception of Open Source is fundamentally correct: that what makes the difference in Open Source projects is the erasure of the distinction between developers and endusers: both can collaborate on the project they feel they own and from which they will benefit.
"We have now several extraordinary enduser projects: the Marketing Project, yes, but also, and firstly, the Native Language Development Projects, which provide resources and forums in French, German, Dutch, Italian, and, soon, several other languages. All of these are run by members of varying technological skill; some, in fact, are quite technologically inexperienced.
"But they have been able to collaborate using the OpenOffice.org infrastructure, SourceCast, and been able to effect their vision of what OpenOffice.org should be--a People's Thing. Collaboration using SourceCast has meant that users have been able to work together via mailing lists, project pages, you name it, and not worry about the software limitations. The result is the birth of OpenOffice.org 1.0 as something that is theirs."
-- Louis Suárez-Potts, Community Manager, Project Lead, Distribution, Incubator, Mirrors, Native-Lang, Website.
