It has been 12 hours since the LibreOffice announcement, and the projects starts to do its first steps.
- Neil Brown had submitted the first patch to LibreOffice, after waiting for 3 years (!) while the patch was available at the openoffice.org issues system (#80637).
- Michael Meeks had published “Minutes of first LibreOffice technical group call“. The general plan is to accept patches (“no large / risky / de-stabilising (new) feature work”) from the community and also merge the changes already done to openoffice.org (existing CWS).
- The public is welcome to help cleaning the existing code, Gil Forcada already started. see the EasyHacks list for the tasks to be done.
- LibreOffice mirrors now also contain the source code for the beta release done in the morning.
- Patches are welcome at libreoffice@lists.freedesktop.org or using the Bugzilla. See “Get Involved Developing LibreOffice” for more info.
You’re welcome to join us…
Free Software Universe 
Let’s hope they remove all the stinking easter eggs from the codebase.
You cite issue 80637 as a prime example of a good patch lying around and not being integrated or even looked at. Well, let’s see what happened:
1. It was triaged by a tester for evaluation by a developer for the related code
2. the stupid and lazy developer didn’t do a thing with the good patch for three years! A clear case for splitting of the project and creating an own fork where such lazy bastards have no say and so do not waste everybodys time!
Well, who was that developer in the issue? Of all the things it was thb, also known as Thorsten Behrens who now plays a very prominent role in the LibreOffice steering comitee!
The issue mentioned in Michael’s post was ignored 3 years by one of the founders of The Document Foundation, to whom this issue has been assigned since Sept 2007, not by an employee of the “OO.o-controlling” company. 😉
@Anton, kso: Please calm down, let’s cite Michael Meeks
“It seems our first patch posted to the list, was by Neil Brown – ace kernel block layer (and elswhere) hacker – (who works for Novell, but whose contribution had got wedged between the cracks somehow), to fix some misbehaviour of the blocks in Impress’ disolve transition (fun). After three years of being ignored (interestingly it is still assigned to Thorsten, now at Novell, who left Sun shortly after getting the bug) it finally made it into LibreOffice – go Neil ! ”
http://www.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2010-09-28.html
@Anton, @kso:
The real problem is that #80637 is just one example for a major problem – people try to contribute and do not attention.
There are patches laying around for years, and some of the bidi patches are 4 years old.
This makes developers take their business elsewhere as their contribution isn’t appreciated. And there are of course consequences for the users.
The way the project treats people contribution, and especially patches from the community is one of the things we would like change during the move to a pure community project.
This doesn’t mean the openoffice.org project or it’s hired developers are suddenly bad, but we know what we do want to change.
I have observed quite a lot of revolutions in Africa and Latin-America. After freedom fighters have taken the country, the generals and colonels start fighting amongst each other and get the country into a bigger mess then ever before. This is quite sure what Oracle is counting on, then OpenOffice is still theirs.
The task at hand is to set up a proper infrastructure and then get to work, not to point fingers.
Getting OpenOffice away from the control of a single commercial party is a commendable initiative. Now show the world it is an improvement. Keep your head cool, set up a proper and transparent infrastructure to start with.
You have my support! Good luck!
But the name!
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