For those interested in such matters, I’m proposing this little genealogical chart of the family. Any comments, corrections, etc will be gratefully acknowledged!

Indeed, the ASF has achieved two amazing success stories – it produces the world’s most popular webserver, despite competition from commercial giants likes Microsoft; and it has succeeded in straddling the gulf between the open source communities and commercial software houses without upsetting either camp. For this reason, the announcement yesterday by Oracle (with a little help from IBM) that it was putting forward OpenOffice.org for adoption by the ASF is a fascinating development.

History lesson: Oracle acquired the OpenOffice.org software as part of its acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Within a few months, the volunteer community (which had been such a feature of OpenOffice.org) upped sticks and announced the formation of The Document Foundation as a home for the continuing OpenOffice.org project – which they had to rebrand as LibreOffice as Oracle had hung on to the OpenOffice.org trademark. TDF has succeeded in establishing credibility, releasing new versions of LibreOffice, and raising substantial funds in an appeal to supporters.

So, this latest move by Oracle could be seen as a move to wrong foot the volunteers in TDF. Alternatively, it could be seen an eminently sensible step for them to take. If OpenOffice.org passes the ASF adoption process, then there will be no question about whether it is a ‘genuine open source project’. You can’t get much more open source street cred than ASF branding. Oracle and IBM can continue to release commercial derivatives of OOo for their customers (as they do with the Apache Web Server), and might even persuade Red Flag to join the party. And the ASF can make the leap from the world’s server rooms to the world’s desktops.

But what about the folks at The Document Foundation? they have invested huge amounts of time and energy in establishing their new baby. It would not be easy to get back into bed with Oracle and IBM, as their initial response suggests. But maybe it’s time to set aside history, set aside the personality issues on all sides, take a deep breath, and decide which route is most likely to create great software that can continue to challenge Microsoft on the desktops of the world.

Well, there’s nothing like asking people to put their hands in their wallets to find out what level of support you have. That’s what The Document Foundation guys did. They needed 50,000 Euro to set themselves up as a legal entity under German law. Not a trivial sum! So they set up a web site and asked people to contribute 50,000 Euro in four weeks.

And contribute they have. I was amazed to see they’ve reached their target in just eight days. That is pretty amazing – I guess The Document Foundation is now full of people pinching themselves in disbelief.

Well done folks.

Has the transition been successful? I’m about to download the software and try it out – why not do the same?

OpenOffice.org – the previous incarnation of LibreOffice – was proud of its adoption rate in Brazil (where – confusingly – for trademark reasons it was known as BrOffice). Unusually, take-up was particularly strong from commercial organisations, for example with tens of thousands of users reported in both Banco do Brasil and Petrobras.

So today’s news is a vote of confidence in the new Foundation, and shows that the transition from the corporate run OpenOffice.org to the community managed Document Foundation is still continuing. We can expect keen interest in the forthcoming release of LibreOffice 3.3, particularly as Oracle has decided to go it alone and continue development of OpenOffice.org under the Oracle badge.

From their official reaction, it looks as though Oracle haven’t yet decided how to respond to their adult child leaving home unilaterally. It’s a bit naive to expect them to be wildly enthusiastic. However, having an active community is what makes OpenOffice.org special, and Oracle are wise enough to realise that.

Early indications are that the group of OpenOffice.org volunteers who set up The Document Foundation have read the mood of the community correctly, and that the activist community will follow them into the new Foundation. If so, the old Oracle owned mailing lists, support forums, etc. will simply wither and die, and all the buzz will be around LibreOffice.

The beauty of open source is that success or failure is visible to the world. In a month or two, everyone will be able to see the pace of development of LibreOffice versus Oracle’s continuing OpenOffice.org, and decide which is the better bet for the future.

The Document Foundation has got off to a roaring start, but they have to prove themselves in the long haul. If I was an Oracle executive, I’d be playing wait and see too.

The option of migrating from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice is becoming increasingly attractive.

This seems to be a good analogy for the news that I’m hearing from my former colleagues at OpenOffice.org, where I worked for many years as a volunteer. OpenOffice.org was created ten years ago by Sun Microsystems, then one of the big names in IT, with a mission to challenge Microsoft’s domination of the office software market. Under Sun’s generous sponsorship, it proved highly successful, attracting thousands of supporters and around 15% market share.

However, there were increasing calls that it was time for the Community to move out from the parental home and stand on its own two feet. While you’re living at home, it can be difficult if you want to strike up relationships your parents don’t approve of, but which may actually be for your own good. Without wanting to stretch the family analogy too far, if your parents then have relationship problems of their own, this can prove the last straw – and for some key OpenOffice.org volunteers, the acquisition by Oracle of Sun Microsystems last year was indeed the final straw.

So, today, the OpenOffice.org community has declared UDI, and has set up an independent foundation – The Document Foundation – where they will be free to live their own lives. They are optimistic that Oracle Corporation will not be too upset with developments, and will agree to pass on to their grown-up children the belongings they have had to leave behind – such as the OpenOffice.org trademark. In the meantime, they have announced that their future releases of OpenOffice.org will be known as LibreOffice.

I wish them every success in their new, grown-up world.

The answer is of course much simpler than the conspiracy theorists would like. Since taking early retirement last November I have – ironically – had even less time than before to spend on OpenOffice.org business. I missed the last Community Council meeting, and I’m going to miss the next two, and I don’t really see things improving in the near future. It wasn’t an easy decision to make, but it seemed only right to make way for someone who has sufficient bandwidth to do the job properly.

And for the conspiracy theorists: any merger / acquisition process makes life difficult for the employees of the target company. The Sun Microsystems team in Hamburg were and are major contributors to OpenOffice.org. It’s very hard to participate fully in an open-source community when there are severe regulatory pressures to prevent ‘leaks’ of information. There’s also a natural human tendency to keep your head down and your mouth shut when you’re not sure what’s going to happen to your job.

Am I disillusioned? The Community Council is where the Sunnies and the volunteers come together from a governance perspective, so it’s not surprising that it’s been tough going there recently. I’m optimistic that with the right people on board, the Community Council can serve the community well. A steady influx of new blood is essential for that to happen – serving successive terms should be an exception rather than a rule.

What about Oracle? IMHO IT vendors – especially software vendors – are a bunch of shysters, hucksters, pimps, and pushers earning ridiculous fees peddling the impossible to the ignorant. Among this slough of mendacity, Sun Microsystems in my experience stood out as a beacon of comparative probity. Let’s hope the ex-Sunnies keep their core values as they are absorbed into their new corporate structures.

And no, I haven’t been offered a job by Microsoft.

Today’s graph (saved on this blog – click on the thumbnail for a bigger version) shows a couple of interesting ‘spikes’. On 11th February we announced OpenOffice.org 3.2, and the downloads jumped as a result. This publicity is aimed at the general media and people who haven’t yet discovered OpenOffice.org.

On 26th February we switched on the online update notification for a number of language groups. This tells existing users directly that OpenOffice.org 3.2 is available. The result has been a much bigger and more sustained increase in downloads. So, well done developers – the new features added in this release are attracting old and new users alike.