If you follow any of the sites that track OpenOffice.org, it will not come as a complete surprise that the release of OpenOffice.org 3.1 is imminent. Despite our pleas, there are many bloggers who love to be the first with the news (even before it is news), which then leads to complaints from people that their downloads have failed – well yes they will fail, if the software hasn’t made it to their local mirror, or our central download page isn’t pointing to the right place yet.

I wonder whether next time we would be better simply going ahead with a ‘future dated’ release announcement – e.g.

The Release Committee have today approved the release of OOo n.m stable version to the mirror network. It will be available from the OOo download page on dd-mmm at hh:mm – to guarantee a good experience, please do not try and download before hh:mm on dd-mmm.

Please note that if you have already downloaded RCn, there is no need to download this stable version – it’s the same software.

It’s great that people want to spread the news – maybe we should try harder to make it possible for them to work with us, rather than appear to be against us?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 at 9:14 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.