The launch of the OpenOffice.org 3.0 software on October 13th last year has proved wildly successful, with over 30 million downloads recorded to date via the ‘bouncer’ at download.openoffice.org. So for 2009, the Openoffice.org Marketing Project is focussing more on the other half of its remit – marketing the OpenOffice.org Community. This Community includes developers (core software and extensions), testers, translators, technical authors, web designers, artists, … yes, and even marketing folks.

There’s a great posting today in GullFOSS about what can be involved in being an OpenOffice.org core developer (it also slays the myth that you need to work for Sun Microsystems to get your code into OpenOffice.org – so don’t believe everything that developers of rival products may say in their blogs ;-) ). OpenOffice.org is one of the biggest pieces of open-source code out there, relied upon by hundreds of millions of users, so any change has to be carefully thought through, and syndicated with all the people in the project who need to know. If it requires changes to the file format used by OpenOffice.org – OpenDocument Format – you may even need to get your change signed off by ISO, the International Organisation for Standards!

So, congratulations to Martin (the developer cited in the GullFOSS post), and all the other independent developers. Contributing to OpenOffice.org requires not only a high level of technical ability, but also a high level of interpersonal skills. It’s a wonderful boost to a developer’s professional CV, plus the warm glow inside from knowing that hundreds of millions of people around the world are using your code.

• Is it easy being an OpenOffice.org core developer? no.
• Is it worth it? well, during the 3.0 release cycle we counted more than 100 contributors to the code, the build system, localization, test scripts and so on – plus other developers submitting patches via the bug tracking system. So they think it’s worth it! (that’s another myth slayed by the way, that OpenOffice.org is a dying horse through a lack of developers).

Want to know more? See Contributing to OpenOffice.org.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 13th, 2009 at 12:56 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.