The Apache OpenOffice.org (incubator) project was born on Monday, June 13, 2011.  Delivery was complicated.  The baby’s doing fine.

Following the June 1, 2011 announcement of the license grant from Oracle to the Apache Software foundation, there was extensive discussion over the proposal for acceptance of OpenOffice.org as an Apache incubator project.  Before the June 10 voting began, 207 edits had been made to the proposal.  Discussion leading up to the vote swamped the public mailing list used for consideration and oversight of incubator projects.

We’re now taking the baby steps that will lead us to a healthy, thriving project:

  • The open, public developers list, ooo-dev, is operating and active.  Anyone can subscribe and post.  Anyone can access the archive.
  • There is a fledgling Community Wiki.  Anyone can subscribe and post.  Anyone can access the wiki.
  • There is also a Developer Wiki.  Contributions here are treated as deliverables of the project.  Anyone can access the wiki, but contributions to this wiki require submission of an Apache Contributor License Agreement.  Perhaps this wiki could have a better name?
  • There is a project web site.  The content is rather thin at the moment.  It is growing.
  • There’s also a place in the Apache Subversion repository for all of the source code.  At the moment that consists of tools and the project web site pages (created in Markdown).

The gathering of contributors for the project is continuing.  In the status of many of the incubating podlings, you’ll find the OpenOffice.org podling’s first check-up.  (Scroll down through the alphabetical list.) 

There is more to do, especially around migration of the sites and their artifacts from their OpenOffice.org homes to their Apache counterparts.  There are more tasks to accomplish than the number already completed.

Everyone wants to know how soon there will be another OpenOffice.org release and how rapidly everything can be up and running.  So do we.  Apache OpenOffice.org will be different.  The differences may be unrecognizable, but they will be there.  Establishing what it takes to reach a sustainable, supported release process as an Apache project is where we first begin by crawling, next to walk, and then to run

This blog is a place for listening to the heartbeat and taking the pulse of the effort as it unfolds.