OpenOffice.org 2.2 was released officially today. The policy of more frequent releases is bringing “time to market” benefits, but it does run the risk that each release is less “newsworthy” in the eyes of the media. However, our Press Release is attracting good interest, so maybe we have the balance right.

The route to market for 2.2 was not particularly smooth. Issues revealed by testing meant a series of slippages from the originally scheduled date of February 27th. How many commercial software packages would have simply gone ahead with the launch? - and quietly postponed the bug fixes to a future Service Pack.

In OpenOffice.org everything is open - the bugs; the developers’ response to them; and the history of moving dates - everything is in the public domain. Even our press releases are drafted on a public wiki.

The only area where we do preserve a veil of secrecy is in security fixes, and this is one area where we ran into trouble with 2.2. We had a vulnerability reported and fixed, and decided to release the fix as part of 2.2. However, 2.2 slipped, and other builders of OpenOffice.org started getting nervous. In the end, the news broke - much to the annoyance of OpenOffice.org Community members who had not been in the know. We had to go public, and offer worried users Release Candidate 4 as a solution (which in fact became OpenOffice.org 2.2).

The text I gave Louis for the OpenOffice.org home page tried to put it into perspective:

Several security vulnerabilities have been reported on in the media in the last week, where users’ PCs could be open to attack if they opened documents from, or accessed web sites set up by, malicious individuals

These issues are fully addressed in the forthcoming OpenOffice.org 2.2. The Release Candidate (RC) of 2.2 - including the security fixes - is available for download now. RCs are produced to allow the widest possible testing of a release immediately prior to the final release - i.e. barring last minute issues, 2.2 will be identical to the RC.

So, if you have a reason to believe that your usage of OpenOffice.org putsyou at risk from the new vulnerabilities, or if you would like to help us with the final testing of 2.2, please download and use the RC now.

If you do find problems with the RC, please report them to us. You will be playing a vital role in helping us ensure the ongoing quality of OpenOffice.org.

It would be great if we have a way of releasing some tiny patch file that could magically fix any version of OpenOffice.org. Alas, that’s something that even the wonder of open-source has yet to deliver to the desktop. Maybe it should be offered as a Summer of Code project?

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 29th, 2007 at 7:41 pm and is filed under OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.