Year Two
2002-10-14
An Extraordinary Year
This year has been extraordinary for OpenOffice.org, and any report of what has happened could not do justice to all who have made it happen nor to all that has happened. So, first off, allow me to state that the most remarkable thing about the last year has been—and will continue to be—the growth and maturation of the OpenOffice.org community.
I include the developers and endusers and everyone who has either coded or submitted patches, suggestions, advice, bugfixes, constructive complaints (lots of those!), praise (lots of that, too), time, effort, money, sleep.
Congratulations, all! This project has far exceeded its promise. OpenOffice.org is used now by millions of people throughout the world, as well as in corporations and governments, both large and small, thanks to you.
Why do they use it? Because it answers the question of not, "Where do you want to go today?" but, "What do you want to do today?" The first is silly and assumes you have lots of cash, the second real and makes no assumptions. It in fact gives you the capital to do what you need to do.
People use OpenOffice.org because it, and the project, work for them. They may be using Linux, Solaris, Windows, FreeBSD, LinuxPPC, IRIX, Linux S/390, TRU64, Mac OS X (via X11): virtually any flavor of Windows or Unix. OpenOffice.org will write, draw, calculate, present in at least 23 languages, and do it using internationally standardized technology that is more robust than, well, you-know-what, whose documents it reads—and will even fix.
The Difference Community Makes
"OpenOffice.org demonstrates that a partnership between a large corporation and the open source developer community is not only possible, but highly productive"—Tim O'Reilly, CEO of O'Reilly & Associates.
A year ago, when I wrote the first birthday report, I was discussing the 638c build. We were not thinking of endusers. But that was before the proposal to adopt the community-sponsored and maintained OpenOffice.org was agreed to by the community earlier this year.
The effect of this decision has been monumental and it is still growing. In a nutshell, the decision shifted more control to the volunteer community over the content and scope of the stable release offered by the Project, OpenOffice.org, thus affirming the implicit covenant between volunteers and Sun, which founded and substantially funds the project. In the last nine months, it has been increasingly the volunteer community, not just Sun, which has shaped the product and the project. And this shaping has only begun.
OpenOffice.org has shifted its focus to include the contributions of endusers as well as coders; and for both groups, we are making it easier to contribute. The recently released SDK is meant to offer developers the tools; documentation and Web areas are coming soon. The Native-Lang, Marketing, Incubator category,QA, and Website projects all accommodate the enthusiasm of people who want to give back to the project what it has given them. This generosity characterizes Open Source. But no other Open Source project of our size, our scope, and our importance has been able to so successfully engaging this enduser enthusiasm to further the Project's goals. Leading this effort is the recently formed QA Project, which has taken on the task of coordinating work on producing community-sponsored products that have been tested by endusers.
We are in fact changing not just what is meant by Open Source but the expectations corporations have in going Open Source. The ramifications are profound. Two key projects are the Native-Lang category (an ensemble of projects) and the Marketing Project, which have altered the way an Open Source project's technology is communicated. Because of Native-Lang, we can coordinate the way users and developers learn of OpenOffice.org and offer to new users and developers the model of a participatory community. OpenOffice.org is not just a product but a process and a relation to a product; the Native-Lang projects help to further that idea.
Native-Lang works in complement with the Marketing Project, which recognizes the importance of communicating our message the form that is understood by corporations and governments. As a result of Marketing's push, OpenOffice.org is widely recognized and has been repeatedly featured by the news media, both U.S. and throughout the world.
The marketing has been effective, too, both in promulgating OpenOffice.org 1.0 and in bringing in new developers and contributors. Since the launch of OpenOffice.org, on May 1, 2002, more than five million people have downloaded the product, more than 60 thousand have joined the project. And that's not all.
Verizon now uses OpenOffice.org 1.0, and it has saved the company millions of dollars. It's the largest corporate user of OpenOffice.org that we are aware of but, as our Testimonial page indicates, it is not the only one by any means. As well, national and local governments throughout the world are turning to OpenOffice.org. Partly, this surely has to with Microsoft's new licensing program (6.0), which assumes that the paying corporation is rich and, importantly, has no other choices (in fact, "no choice" sums up Microsoft's strategy). But the move to OpenOffice.org also has to do with the recognition that the very relationship Microsoft has furthered and off of which it has gotten so rich is not in the people's best interest. It's not even in a corporation's.
In the next six months I fully expect that everything we have so far seen and marveled over—OpenOffice.org's popularity, the growth of the project—will prove to be hints to something vaster. OpenOffice.org is a product that is being recognized as immediately usable but also as something to which one can add things; and OpenOffice.org as a community is only beginning to shape the way people think about their product.
