2003-07-16
What follows is a brief account of OpenOffice.org's days at OSCON 2003, which took place last week in a sweltering Portland, Oregon, USA.
To begin with OSCON (Open Source Convention) this year has focused on enterprise and open source. The conference has been fascinating and exciting--mainly developers but developers who recognize the next step for open source is the enterprise.... And guess which open-source project has bee cited, touted, mentioned, discussed?
But the focus on OpenOffice.org has not been without critique. And it has been the best sort. Over the next week I'll be highlighting some of the more interesting comments, but first, a belated report on OOo days at OSCON.
OSCON, for those not in the know, is where Open Source (with capital letters) began, in 1998, and it remains the defining meeting of the year. This year, Tim O'Reilly set the official tenor of the conference with a packed presentation on where Open Source Software (OSS) is heading and how it is evolving. He calls it, following Thomas Kuhn's famous phrase regarding "revolutions" in scientific understandings, a "paradigm shift": "One of the greatest challenges for open source in the next few years is to understand and adapt to the paradigm shift implicit in network computing, and to shed the legacy thinking of the desktop era." The potential is enormous; the limiting factor is not having open standards. Open standards, distinct from open source, which describes a work method, allow for radical interoperability.
Tim's presentation underscored the importance of collaboration and networks; other presentations and panels focused on technical and abstract problems relating to open-source technology and implementation. I was most interested in those that either touched on OpenOffice.org as a product, project, and exemplar. For OpenOffice.org is not just an open-source project working without a clear organization but a defined corporate-initiated and corporate-sponsored project with structure and organization.
In our presentation, Danese Cooper, Sun's Open Source Diva, and I elucidated OpenOffice.org's structure and emphasized Sun's support for involvement in the project by the open-source community. We addressed questions from developers interested in contributing, from people curious about the enterprise/open-source community relationship, and from general users wondering about this application they have heard so much about. Later in the day, I moderated a BOF (birds of a feather) panel in which we discussed "most wanted" features and elements. I'll be discussing the results of both conversations later. They are interesting.
In addition to our presentations, OpenOffice.org also maintained a *very* active booth in the Sun pod, which was prominently placed. Thanks to Phillip "Flip" Russell, we had hundreds of CDROMs to distribute. I went through all of them. Everyone was encouraging and supportive, and I was able to snag the business cards of many developers who expressed interest in contributing their efforts.
And this was partly the point of attending this conference: to entice the open-source community to work on OpenOffice.org. Why?
Because we want OpenOffice.org to be better. The point is not that open source products work. That, at this point, is a given. The point is that OpenOffice.org should be the best. We should be judged not our mere existence but on our capability; on what we do. Judge us on our merits not on how well we copy somebody else. Why be tied to the proprietary imagination? Open source is about innovation and newness. Let's make it new.
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Louis Suárez-Potts Community Manager OpenOffice.org