Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

git clone http://www.gnome.org/~michael/git/iogrind.git
./autogen.sh && make install
./ext2dump /dev/sda1 /path/to/wherever > wherever.xml
fsview wherever.xml # beware of the monster bugs...

• "A great example of a stride in strategy" & user-friendliness ... would be for OO.o (writer?) to add a feature that noticed if the user would be better off using a DTP app and recommended Scribus instead. Apparently "In the open source world, you loose nothing by advertising somebody else's product..." - really !?
• Most problematic for Louis was (apparently) Novell subsidising a river-boat last year at OOoCon Lyon with meal & champagne. Incidentally we tried to do a similar (wrong?) thing this year but ran into problems... "Rather than a junket, perhaps the money could be better spent by sponsor companies on, for example **training project managers how to work in a more non-hierarchical fashion**" - one has to wonder: which project managers ? and who introduced all the unnecessary (& often dysfunctional) hierarchy we see in OO.o today ?
• Apparently "some companies don't really act as a sponsor in a true sense - they're prepared to contribute resources by supplying people to work on areas of programming ... and don't really work with the non-developer community" - well it's true: we hack on things that we think are interesting & useful to our customers & wrt. growing OO.o, and we invest ~nothing in non-developers. It seems clear (at least to me), that to improve OO.o - we need a lot less talking, and a lot more coding.
• "It would be great to have companies like Novell working more fully with the community, and not just in this market heavy fashion. Novell sponsors OOoCon, which is great, but rather than a barge cruise, using that money to help with QA, localisation and training etc. would see a better return for both Novell and the community as a whole." - some sage advice for sure. I mean, why sponsor a time for OO.o contributors to relax & talk (as a thank-you present for all the hard work they have done in the year) - when instead we could fund a fraction of an extra QA person ? oh & perhaps eat gruel to save money for critical project-manager training ?
• Then we move on to the vexing ethical concerns surrounding the sponsoring of events, we have "How much does it cost to buy the interest of the developer ?" - in general my feeling is approximately the cost of their salary. If anyone feels obliged to be nice to Novell on account of free beer, please don't be. Louis is at least correct to be un-fazed himself. I certainly don't feel indebted to VA, Google, IBM, Sun, Intel, Microsoft, and many others whose hospitality I've enjoyed over the years. Clearly the hope is not to buy people off, but instead to build community by putting people in a single boat, with some beers & encouraging them to talk to each other. From a stark hard-nosed perspective, I would try to persuade management that if we build a more fun & friendly community, Novell benefits via. a better product, though there is some brand, product awareness & feel-good factor too.
• Anyway, it's refreshing to know that the hard issues of the day in OO.o lie, not where I think they are: in the code, it's stewardship, and development: but instead in the ethics of accepting unwanted & unconditional hospitality. Cheers.

• Firstly - welcome, this is an amazing day for both IBM and OO.o. As something Novell has worked hard at (unfortunately behind the scenes) for many months, it's great to see this come to fruition finally.
• Louis Suarez Potts famously re-assured IBM (Don) in Koper that no-one in the community thinks not-releasing your OO.o code-changes is anti-social (or words to that effect). As a person who had spent some time hammering Don on this topic the night before, I was appalled. So I'm happy now to enthusiastically applaud IBM for doing the right thing: releasing all their changes & contributing them to OO.o. It's a great sight to see IBM step out of the proprietary swamp into a world of Free Office Software: following Sun's lead some years ago with OO.o.
• Go IBM ! It takes a lot of courage to start assigning all your code ownership to a competitor. My hope is that as more substantial contributors join OO.o, we will be in a stronger position to make this a truly open project, with meritocratic leadership and ownership (like ~all other successful, open communities).
• Speaking of ownership, here is a trivial spot the imbalance competition (some numbers approximate), just focusing on developers (as of the new world): if we add community translator head-count etc. of course Sun would be swamped numerically (and trying roughly to convert a number of part-time community developers into a guesstimated ~10 full-time equivalents):
  
  
  
  
• Question for Sun mgmt: at what fraction of the community will Sun re-consider it's demand for ownership of the entirity of OO.o ?
• Anyhow, welcome IBM !, I'm glad to have you involved in OO.o, and I look forward to working with you guys to try to make OO.o a project with lower barriers to entry, that people and companes can easily join; oh, and preferably one that is fun to hack on. Lets (finally) start to make OO.o rock.