Free as in strings attached
November 27th, 2005A frustrating week on the OpenOffice.org project. After getting wind of Microsoft’s news briefing on Monday night I notified the OpenOffice.org community so we could put together a co-ordinated response.
Just as the first few emails started to flow, the hosting service the community uses threw a wobbly. The mailing lists ground to a halt, stopping internal communication within the project. Then the mail forwarding caught the disease – emails sent to my openoffice.org address were delayed for hours, days, or simply bounced. Requests from journalists for a quick reply arrived long after their deadlines had past.
A small group of us worked off-list on a PR, which Louis eventually released. However, the whole community was pretty well paralysed for the best part of a week (there are still complaints things haven’t got back to normal yet).
The community’s infrastructure is provided by Collabnet, who are a close bed-fellow of Sun Microsystems, the community’s founding and still principle sponsor. This sponsorship is great for the community while it works, but is very frustrating when it doesn’t. It would be highly embarrassing for both parties if Sun pulled the plug on Collabnet. So it isn’t going to happen.
However, no doubt it will raise again the question of whether the community should be working harder towards setting up an OpenOffice.org Foundation, which would give the community the potential to take more control over its destiny. Finding a hosting partner who can keep mailing lists going reliably might be a good place to start.
The irony here is that the typical less-well-funded open-source project would probably have solved the problem in far less time. There are many examples of heroic performances from volunteers when their project infrastructure is threatened. In this case, paying for a commercial service may actually give a worse result than using volunteers!