With the release of OpenOffice.org 2.4 ‘real soon now’, I’ve just posted a draft Press Release for internal review. Even though this is the last release of the 2 series, it’s still full of goodies, as the new features list on the wiki shows.

Overall, 2.x has been an amazing success story, with an incredible eleven releases since 2.0 in October 2005 (the timeline is here). The entire Community has responded to the challenge to release more frequently, minimising the delay between developers coding new features, and users being able to use them on their desktops.

Achieveing this without compromising quality has not been easy, with much of the burden falling on the QA team (can you help?). Issues revealed in the last stages of testing can trigger an additional release candidate, a slippage in the launch date, and calls from journalists as to why there is a delay.

However, coming from a world of commercial IT, I see this process as one of the strengths of OpenOffice.org. All the discussions as to whether a release is fit for purpose are in the public domain. We have nothing (nowhere!) to hide. If this was how the whole software industry operated, the quality of software could only improve.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 9th, 2008 at 11:59 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.