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Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2011 10:50:09 +0200
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Subject: Not new but under a new hat
From: =?UTF-8?Q?J=C3=BCrgen_Schmidt?= <jogischmidt@googlemail.com>
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Hi,

i am not really new here and be one of the initial committers but i would
take the opportunity to let you know that i got the chance to work fulltime
on the project in the future as an IBM employee.

After 14 years with Sun and Oracle and working on the OOo project since the
beginning i was affected by the announcement of Oracle earlier this year in
several ways. The project where i has spent a lot of work and energy into it
was dropped in a somewhat unclear future including the team in HH. And i had
to confess that i felt in some kind of a hole and thought it would be time
for a longer break. But with the grant of the source code to the Apache
foundation it rose at least the chance for the project to continue and
become an independent project under the well accepted Apache foundation. I
thought ok, Apache not TDF or any other institution but it's Oracles
decision and it's now up to the community to continue the project. That was
the reason why i joined the AOO project early without knowing what i will do
tomorrow from a professional perspective. I spent a lot of time in the
summer to relax and thinking about the future of the project, my
occupational career etc. In the end i accepted the offerig by IBM and i am
really happy that i can now continue the work on the project.

I will focus on making the project Apache conform first and to make a binary
release available asap. I will help by the integration of changes made for
Symphony that will definitely bring the project forward (e.g.
IAccessiblity2) and of course i will continue with all the other work that i
have done in the past for the project.

There are a lot of things to do where we need a lot of volunteers helping
the project to grow in the future. I really hope that over time we can
reunify the 2 projects AOO and LibreOffice from a technical perspective and
can share at least a common code base. From my point of view the reasons for
the fork are not longer valid and it should be possible to continue one
project, one office together. That doesn't mean that the TDF should stop
their work, i really respect it and they achieved a lot in the short time.
But from a technical perspective it doesn't make sense to split the
resources in 2 groups working on more or less the same thing. It is still
early enough to reunify the code base and use the well known brand
OpenOffice for a binary release. It would be the best choice for our users.

The good thing at Apache is that all contributors are more or less equal and
it is important what they do. A good chance for all who simply want to bring
the project forward without too much politic in the background. The focus
should be our users and an easy to use office productivity suite for all.

Juergen

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