Conference day two turned out to be – mercifully – more relaxed than the hectic first day. The initial round of meeting and greeting old friends has passed; everyone has found their way round the buildings; and conference breathes a sigh of relief and gets down to business.

My day started at 8.30am with an open question and answer session for the Community Council – opening up the governance process of the Community. This was an innovation this year, and went down well despite the ridiculously early time. We’d asked for email questions as well as from the floor, and had the inevitable flood of questions about features – as well as a number of good questions about governance and policy, which is the real business of the Council.

The day’s official topic was extensions – opening up the OpenOffice.org product to a new community of developers. Getting code into the core OpenOffice.org product is both a technical and a procedural challenge, even for skilled software engineers. The extensions mechanism has transformed this, and makes it easy to develop new features in a variety of languages. Extensions can be added in and removed by users easily from a central repository, and work just like the core product. We look forward to seeing all sorts of innovative ‘add-ons’ appearing as a result.

Another strand was opening up OpenOffice.org components for other software companies to use. There is a proposal within the Community to reposition ourselves as an ‘office component factory’. The fact that we happen to bundle those components into an office suite is secondary. Conference heard from a number of teams using these components. For example, offering OpenOffice.org functionality over the internet – ’software as a service’. This is the kind of technical challenge that developers love, and it will be up to the marketplace to decide which of these teams has got it right – or if people want such a service.

However, it’s just as important for the community to ensure that the core development continues, which brings me on to the final two sessions of the day – how to we open up the core development process and encourage new independent developers into the project? Novell’s Fridrich Štrba gave a humorous and heartfelt plea for “developers, developers, developers”, with a Q&A/discussion session which threatened to go on all night. This was followed by another Conference innovation – a workshop where developers from all the major sponsors and independents joined marketing project members and others for an intensive brainstorming session on marketing to developers.

Open-source proponents are known for their passion, enthusiasm, and dedication, but also for their tendency for ‘flame wars’ and generally factious behaviour. This, as they say, is also what sells newspapers, and this article in Computerworld painted a picture of an OpenOffice.org community on the verge of implosion. Maybe we should have paid for the journalists to come to Barcelona (rather than funding impecunious speakers) so they could meet the real community. The photo shows developers from all backgrounds – not stabbing each other in the back – but working together and reaching a surprising degree of consensus as to what we need to do, on the very subject that Computerworld claims is splitting the Community.

Maybe I should have staged a photograph of Sun, IBM, Novell, RedFlag, and other developers throwing rocks at each other. It might have sold a few newspapers.

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