A lil bit late but I listen this week to LUGRadio which invited Michael Meeks to talk about the state of the development of OpenOffice.org and what is looking in the horizon for the OOo.
I liked the interview for the most part, but I do agree with some communication Issues around the OOo community. Until the leaders that the mailing list is not the ideal way to manage a community and also promote the community changes to the larger community is not functionable functionable. Instead we see the leaders attacking projects such as SpreadOpenOffice.org which is created with the intend exactly to promote the OOo as a product and as a community. While other communities like the Mozilla already going to the next step making announcements using the Flash Video and similars. Still OpenOffice.org people have come up with interesting animations which I safely guard on my HD and show it to my friends whenever I have the chance. I think that once we start accepting the potential of PodCasting, and RSS and using them to a larger degree we will be able to enhance this community and hopefully make it grow more and more. Most of the topics of the interview were interesting such as the importance of the UNO flexibility and bridging to modern languages. I do hope that Python developers help the pyUNO speed up it’s integration with OOo and solve the logistic problems. If you think you can help please check the UDK mailing list.
Ideas, thoughts and Free Software 