Re: [tdf-discuss] Hello! ... and lurking :-)

Hi Greg, all,

thank you very much for coming here!

Your efforts in working on a community united and collaborating as much 
as possible are really appreciated!

Greg Stein schrieb:
> Hi all,
>
> I imagine you've all heard about the proposal[1] to contribute OO.o to
> the Apache Software Foundation. I've been involved with Apache for
> well over a decade, on its Board of Directors since 2001, its current
> Vice Chairman, the VP of Apache Subversion, and was the Chairman for
> five years. In short: lots of Apache experience.

Short introduction from my side: For about 6 or 7 years active member of 
the OOo community, spent quite an amount of time in helping to avoid a 
split in the germanophone OOo project back in 2004 (?), became central 
contributor and coordinator in OOo Art and Branding Project and now here 
at LibreOffice from Sept. 2010.
> I've been following and participating in the discussion around the
> OO.o proposal on the general@incubator.apache.org list[1]. One of the
> threads of that discussion was to reach out to the people in the
> Document Foundation and the LibreOffice communities. So... that's this
> email. I'm now subscribed to discuss@df, steering-discuss@df, and
> libreoffice@freedesktop.

I think this list here is the best for discussions about the community,
steering-discuss for contacting the Steering Committee members and 
libO@freedesktop for developers.
> I intend to lurk regarding all the regular work that you all are doing
> here. I'll be paying particular attention to any conversations or
> concerns that you may have about the OOo/Apache stuff, and will
> attempt to answer questions that you may have. I'm catching up on the
> archives now.

That's what I tried with the general@incubator list - quite challenging 
at this time ;-)

I already wanted subscribe to it and post my question there, but perhaps 
(due to the emotional style of discussion over there at the moment) it 
is better to ask you here:

In his mail 
http://www.mail-archive.com/general@incubator.apache.org/msg28210.html 
Sam Ruby points out, that an incubator proposal has to be discussed in 
the community before presenting it to Apache.

He cites the guidelines for proposals:
http://incubator.apache.org/guides/proposal.html

"The incoming community needs to work together before presenting this
proposal to the incubator. Think about and discuss future goals and
the reasons for coming to Apache."

If this would have been handled in a proper way, Oracle would have 
discussed this step with the OpenOffice.org community *before*.

This would have reduced the traffic at the Apache list to a minimum - 
leaving out bad blood and lot of noise...

As you probably know, defining the OpenOffice.org community has been 
easy until last September, but now there are two different definitions, 
depending on whom you ask:

While the people working here on LibreOffice understand themselves and 
the left-over OpenOffice.org as two projects within one community, some 
people on the OOo lists deny the positive feelings towards 
OpenOffice.org by the people who decided to create a single-sponsor 
independent foundation 8 months ago. In their eyes the LibO-supporter 
lost their right to support OpenOffice.org and feel as OOo community 
member with their support of LibreOffice.

This background is important to know, if you want to understand, what is 
going on at the Apache list.

But not even the remnant OOo project (that lacks an active governing 
body since all Community Council members not being payed by Oracle have 
been forced to leave when they announced their dedication to an 
independent foundation and all present seats should have been re-elected 
for a long time) has been involved in discussion before Oracle donated 
the trademark to Apache and IBM (via Rob Weir) proposed the incubator 
project to Apache.

My question is: Wouldn't it be reasonable to have a discussion - and a 
positive voting for Apache - inside the (smaller or broader) 
OpenOffice.org community *before* reaching out for Apache?

If I understand it right, Apache projects are community projects - not 
sponsor based projects (even if they have bought the communities 
trademarks from entities who held them once as legal representatives for 
the community)?
> If you have any comments, questions, or concerns, then please feel
> free to direct them my way (on whatever list). I'm here to listen and
> understand, and to offer up answers where I can.

There are some other points I'd like to mention - like copy-left 
dedication of the mainly volunteer community who dislike any company 
increasing their profits by using these volunteers hard work (and lot of 
time) without giving back anything (not even respect) - but this would 
lead too far in this single mail.

> Cheers,
> -g

Welcome here again, Greg!

Best regards

Bernhard
> [1] http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/OpenOfficeProposal
> [2] send mail to general-subscribe@incubator.apache.org if you would
> like to subscribe and directly talk about the proposal
I don't know if the most productive outcome of my thought and our 
discussion would be here or on the Apache list. What do you think: 
Should I subscribe and re-post my mail there?
Or is is better (and more peaceful, thus leading to a better 
signal/noise relation) to stay here and have you as moderator to take 
the message to the Apache list?

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