Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

The story behind the story behind the news today

• Up early; the marathon is over - and here we are: LibreOffice and the Document Foundation have been announced. Finally we have a project that will be fun to hack on, and not beset with keep out signs (many sadly still invisible to the existing owner). If you want to get involved, there is no better time than now (at the beginning), and there is no better place than LibreOffice.
• So, many others have spoken about the sea-change in the community and industry that made LibreOffice possible. And indeed, I'm almost a convert to the idea that total non-developers can provide lots of tangible value now, despite myself. Clearly it took a lot of courage and accomodation to work together as a team, which was for the most part a pleasure. I hestitate to call out any of this rich set of characters I'm growing to love; you can see them here
• Having said all that, I'd like to point out some of the super-stars that you won't perhaps see on the web-site with bow-ties, in glorious monochrome. First Jeremy Allison, Bradley Kuhn and Jonathan Blandford, old friends without whose wise counsel and assistence, nothing would have got done; thanks too to Michael Dexter and Karen Sandler who put in lots of hard work behind the scenes. Simon Phipps' whose sage support is much appreciated - eg. tweet of the day: "If the company sponsor stands still and the community moves on, who forked ?", and Christopher Aillon for his indulgence.
• Then of course Fridrich Strba and Petr Mladek generating builds for Windows and Linux, (and Thorsten for OSX) - and re-spinning them until late at night, with Peter Poeml doing wonders with mirror services. My entire product management hierarchy were flexible, supportive and decisive under time pressure: Pete Chadwick, Holger Dyroff, Carlos Montero-Luque and more. Finally - in the last minute panic of hourly revisions to the 'final' press release, Guy Lunardi stepped into the breach and over many hours (with help from Christophe) made the website both beautiful, and complete - I'm honoured by his friendship.
• Stepping back, it has been amazing to work towards this goal, perhaps unwittingly with a team of great developers around the globe; many of whom have stuck through thick and thin, persisting even when the fashion was against them, to bring us to where we are today.

Initial thoughts

• Apparently positivity is a key attribute - so, it must be good that tons of people suddenly subscribed to my twitter feed (that I almost never use), how gratifying. It has been wonderful to get lots of personal mails of congratulation from many including, several ex-OpenOffice hackers, saying they might get involved again. It was great to see a good number of people jumping into the #libreoffice (developers) IRC channel on freenode, helping improve the hackers documentation, downloading and building the code, and getting eager about doing some of the Easy Hacks (nice entry level tasks), and merging some of their first patches.
• Similarly, from a web infrastructure perspective, it was great to see a reverse slashdot effect, with the site going slow as (presumably) people refreshed slashdot.org in a loop waiting for the libreoffice.org announcement to hit the wire.
• Another pleasure was the first technical steering call planning our next moves and tentative schedule (minutes). We made a number of clean decisions in 30minutes of pleasant, friendly, collegial conversation; something new. It is great to have a solution for every problem, rather than a problem for every solution.
• 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 !
• In another turn up for the books, the documentfoundation website was slashdotted, and yet continued to serve pages, while at the same time git, bugzilla and mailing list worked normally without interruption. Thanks no doubt to Florian Effenberger's skill and cunning.

The future

• LibreOffice is going to be a fun place for developers to live, and strike their blow for freedom - without a doubt. Get involved now, and help to shape the software and the social life for the next decade.