You may have seen the news early last December that Sun was putting up one million US dollars to “foster innovation and recognize the most interesting initiatives within open source communities worldwide”. The OpenOffice.org Community was named as one of the lucky recipients who would share in Sun’s generosity.

As some Community members have pointed out, things have gone rather quiet since then. I can assure them it isn’t for lack of activity. The OpenOffice.org Community Council set up a sub-committee to hammer out the details, and come up with a proposition that would meet Sun’s objectives and which would fire the imagination of contributors new and existing across the world.

OpenOffice.org is unique among the six chosen projects in that its best known offering – the OpenOffice.org Office Productivity Suite – is very much an end-user product. This means that there are huge opportunities for anyone to get involved – only a small minority of community members are “hackers” (software engineers). People anywhere in the world can help with translation, support, QA, documentation, marketing, artwork … “whatever you do well, do it for OpenOffice.org”.

While this makes for a brilliant community, it also makes it interesting to come up with a contest that will encourage outstanding contributions in any of these fields. Plus of course when there is a corporate sponsor, there is a legal / compliance / regulatory interest to keep on board. However, for a share of a million dollars, it’s worth putting in the effort. We’re nearly there – keep an eye open for the announcement!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 at 8:06 am and is filed under OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.