How to join the OpenOffice.org project?

Information for all

What users should do

What developers should do


As you might have heard, the future development of OpenOffice.org (OOo) will happen under the roof of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF).

More information about OpenOffice.org @ Apache can be found here:

Hope to see you soon at Apache!


For Users:

For questions relating to the use of OpenOffice.org (the application) write a mail to: users@openoffice.apache.org. A very popular and effective mailing list. This list is in English only (for other languages visit the "Native-Lang"project lists).

Please note that this is not a normal mail address but a mailing list. Please familiarize yourself with the Mailing List Guidelines and the text below if you have not already and do not know what this means.

All our lists are public

They are not private message centers. Messages posted to them are carried by, among others, Gmane and MarkMail. They are public. Therefore, consider carefully what you say: thousands if not millions may read your words and they won't just read them today but also decades from now.

Anyone can post to our most popular lists, but if you are not already subscribed, your message will be moderated. In this way, we limit the amount of spam entering the message lists.

Of the lists to which you might consider subscribing, the most useful are the "discuss," "users," and "announce." Both the discuss and users lists accept posts; the announce list does not. Its function is to disseminate important information that is of interest to the general community. Individual projects have their own announce and discuss lists, too. As a rule, honor the nature of the list.

If you want to post a message without it being moderated, please subscribe to the relevant mailing list. To subscribe to any list, all you have to do is click on the "Subscribe" links and send on the empty email message that will be automatically generated and addressed. This message is just to let the friendly computer know of your intentions; you will immediately, upon sending this first note, receive a confirmation notice. Follow the instructions and send it back. Thus, to subscribe to the general discuss list, you just send mail to sympa@openoffice.org with the subject:subscribe discuss and then follow the instructions.

OpenOffice.org Member Responsibilities: Mail Lists

  1. Members are encouraged to participate in any mailing list as long as they honor Open Source principles of respect to other members and to the project at hand and abide by the basic rules of netiquette. (See the Guidelines for information.)
  2. Repeated violation of these principles will result in suspension of the subscriber's membership in the relevant mailing list. If the subscriber insists on joining under different aliases, the subscriber's posts will be quarantined.
  3. Spam is not tolerated. For the most part, OpenOffice.org avoids spam by restricting posts to subscribers. In the rare case where a spammer subscribes to a list and posts spam to the list, he or she will be deleted from the list. Continued violation will result in the spammer being reported to his or her ISP (Internet Service Provider).
  4. Please do not send attachments with your message, as they add to the bandwidth burden we must all deal with. OpenOffice.org features several other avenues for persons interested in submitting attachments. Send a message to infrastructure team to find out which would be best for you.

Mailing List Guidelines

Please familiarize yourself with the Mailing List Guidelines, if you have not already.


For Developers:

Developers, some of the old folks as well as some new ones, are currently working on the code import from the OOo repository to the ASF repository. In parallel similar work is done for the Bugzilla content, the wiki, the web pages etc. Currently OOo still is an "incubator" project and it will remain in that state until it fulfills all criteria for an accepted ASF project. One of the most important criteria is that all code that is used for a release is licensed under the ASF license or a compatible license. (OK, it is a little bit more complicated, but you may get the idea.) As soon as the code import to the ASF repository is done, the work will go further on that. Some parts of this work can be seen here:

Later on the OOo development will continued at the ASF and as a part of that it will be tried to move over all the unfinished work of OOo from the last months. And of course the the OOo 3.4 release will be finished with a high priority.

Every developer is invited to join us, old hackers as well as new ones. Please join the new project's mailing list and help us to shape the next decade of OpenOffice.org development: