Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

2012-05-21: Monday

2012-05-21T20:59:09Z

Up early; bought some PTFE tubing for making bowden extruders from reprapworld. Poked mail. Mildly amused to read an interview with Rob W. accompanied by a substantial google advert for LibreOffice thanks to go-downloads.com, nice.
Tried to persuade the gtk+ team of the general loveliness of enabling getting threading right inside the toolkit rather than dozens of different applications. Wrote status report.
Dug at the Android build a bit. Dinner, out to the local council meeting to discuss the proposed plan - the council recommended against them; home - lit fire for counselling supervision meeting; back to Android poking.

2012-05-20: Sunday

2012-05-20T21:00:00Z

Up lateish; off to St Ives for a Plumbline service in a fine set of barns. Hog roast afterwards, bouncy castle in the adjacent grain barn, lots of fun. Back later for another spin of the Tintin with the babes.
Out for a drink with some other planning victims.

2012-05-19: Saturday

2012-05-19T21:00:00Z

Up lateish, slugged in the house for a bit. Took the babes into town to get Tintin out for the babes including H. to watch. Tried to buy a 23 guage needle to try to make a new type of reprap / mixing extruder I'm hoping to make; couldn't buy one at Boots - odd.
Took the babes to the playground, back for lunch. Checked mail; watched Tintin with the babes, fine homemade pizza dinner. Lydia over to watch Tintin in the evening - hacked on repsnapper at the same time. Bed.

2012-05-18: Friday

2012-05-18T21:00:00Z

Up early; mail chew, great to see the good work that David(s), Matus etc. have been doing on the gbuild conversion - switching away from a plunging 'dmake' compile to a pure gnumake version which has a ton of parallelism advantages.
Encouraged too to read the list of bugs fixed in 3.5.4rc1 release - rapidly ratcheting up the 3.5 quality, with several misc. improvements not captured by the generating script either.
Joined linkedin to try to hunt a few quiet ones down, and curious at the number of people it immediately identified as potential links; I wonder how - I didn't let it see my gmail addressbook.
Fine dinner with the babes in the evening. Back to work for a bit afterwards.

IBM's Symphony code contribution

2012-05-17T21:00:00Z

Today IBM seems about to deliver on their promise of opening up the Symphony codebase. That is a good thing. It represents an important way-point, in the middle of a long process.

A long journey

I recall well meeting Don Harbison at the OpenOffice conference in Koper in 2005, and a memorable party during which I no doubt bored him to death by re-iterating the importance of working with the community, in the open and contributing your code. Then around April 2006, IBM Workplace 2.6 arrived: a proprietary product based on a version of the OpenOffice.org 1.x code-base. That was enabled by the non-copy-left SISSL license variant the code was under at the time. Fast fowarding to September 2007, Lotus Symphony appeared in beta, complete with an interview "IBM joins OpenOffice to widen it's reach" with Doug Heintzman, promising:

"IBM will dedicate a core team of 35 programmers in China to the OpenOffice project, but more people will be added as needed around the world, he said."

Around this time, we got some contributions of parts of the Symphony feature-set thrown-over-the wall. Sadly these were mostly vs. an obsolete code base, and were mostly not maintained or forward ported (though LibreOffice's current Lotus Word Pro filter was rescued from that dump). At the time I confess I was eager for IBM not to contribute anything towards propping up the fundamentally unjustly managed and structured OpenOffice.org project, with which I'd become utterly disillusioned.

As time passed, the waiting and suspense continued to build, in November 2008 at OOoCon Beijing I had the pleasure of meeting Michael Karasick, whose (keynote) gave an apologetic score-card for this contribution, and promised "we will be contributing". More time passed. By July 2011, the donation of the code was announced in a press release "IBM Donates Lotus Symphony Source Code to the Apache OpenOffice Project", and still no code.

Then, this week Don Harbison announced that IBM have signed a software grant agreement to the Apache project for the code, which is planned to appear in svn as a single, flat, code dump. At last ! the code will be read and the valuations independently assessed. I have fond memories of working together with Doug, Michael & Don, and I'm certain their commitments were sincerely given and meant on each occasion. I suspect the primary cause of the delay is degrees of embarrassing frustration inflicted by part of a corporate machine fearful of, and unused to the transition costs of open, community based development.

Every day, open and engaged ...

Of course, it is great when code that has been proprietary and closed is finally opened, and licensed in a way that LibreOffice can include it. While there is some sad level of duplication vs. work done in LibreOffice, there are also some nice sounding features that should be useable for our next release as/when we have re-licensed.

On the other hand, one of the real pleasures of working in LibreOffice is the collegial, interaction and co-operation with my much-appreciated colleages from Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical, Lanedo, Google and the hundreds of developers and other supporters that have contributed to the project since we started ~eighteen months ago. The credit these guys deserve, for their outstanding effort defies praise. In my book what looks like the boring, every-day, long-haul work of open interaction to achieve shared goals is worth immeasurably more. It may take time to hammer out results that I don't always agree with, but it is good.

Playing well with the community seems to me to mean a lot more than a one-off code-dump. It also means being willing to compromise and work constructively with others of differing ideological viewpoints, encouraging and motivating people to work together.

It means that companies should not horde their changes, to try to be first to the market. There should be direct contribution of the totality of bug fixes and improvements, as they are made, to an appropriate branch. Unfortunately, licensing is a factor here too. The Apache license, by providing you with the choice of when to release your code: "now ? later ? never ?" creates an economic incentive to horde and create a saleable, proprietary feature-edge. That in turn creates a disincentive for others to share. In contrast, a weak copy-left license pushes people inevitably towards sharing, working together, and a service & support based business model.

Hoping for good corporate citizens

So, what does this mean, if anything ? if this move signals a genuine change of heart, towards working collaboratively with the developer community in a sustained and non-proprietary fashion - releasing code changes as they are made and working fully in the open, that is good news. Of course, the most convincing way to make such a commitment to work well as peers with the community, is to join with the existing majority of the developers around the code-base, who are eager to work with IBM as part of LibreOffice. Indeed, more than that - I (and I suspect others) are anxious to make room for our friends from IBM: Peace, Love, LibreOffice ! However, that will inevitably mean making a few real compromises, working in community always requires that. One would be formalizing that intention to contribute well in the most convincing way: using the form of a source-code-license like the MPLv2 or LGPLv3+ which codify such good behaviour. That helps to ensure timely, collaborative code contribution from all players, protecting everyone independent of scale. Is it hard to make such a binding commitment ?

Failing that the option of competing with that community, while trying to build a track record from scratch as an enthusiastic believer in open development, collaboration, compromise, working as an equal, etc. may prove problematic. One canary here may be how this substantial code dump is treated. Will it be split up into individual, digestible features & commits, which can be merged individually into the existing Apache OpenOffice codebase. Or will a single, big, un-documented code commit be attempted ?

A conclusion or two

It looks like IBM will release six+ years of work by their development team; that is a good thing, it will be interesting to see what their sharp team has been up to over that time. Opening previously proprietary software is almost always a good thing, and it may provide our users with some improvements in due course.

In this historical context actions speak much louder than words, but are much harder to extrapolate into the future. Will we see a positive, constructive engagement moving forwards ? the best sign of that would be positive interaction with, compromise and re-unification with the vast majority of developers. An ongoing sadness for me is the lack of even contemplation of that.

Still, in the meantime the LibreOffice community is having fun preparing for it's 3.6 freeze with steady hacking progress; a prototype new feature page is in the process of getting built, though I suspect completing that will need to wait for some last minute features to get pushed. It's a great place to have fun, make a difference and get involved with Free Software, why not try an Easy Hack today ? every little helps.

2012-05-17: Thursday

2012-05-17T21:00:00Z

More mail, pleasant call with Sean, an old friend, lunch. Team meeting, ESC meeting, Vojtech's staff meeting, call with Brian Green. Dinner, back to some typing.

2012-05-16: Wednesday

2012-05-16T21:00:00Z

Mail chew, call with Vojtech; more trawling of statistics, E-mail, and wiki editing; minor patch review. Interview. More admin.

2012-05-15: Tuesday

2012-05-15T21:00:00Z

Up early, more mail chew, generated some bug metrics for the ESC. More patch review / merge, worked at slideware. Continued licensing work.
Advisory Board call in the evening. Dinner with Lydia & J. out for a beer with Chris - good to catch up with him as he prepares to go into the Anglican ministry.

2012-05-14: Monday

2012-05-14T21:00:00Z

Up early; mail chew, created another commit account, patch review variously for the 3.5.4rc1 freeze today. Pushed a substantial grammar checker speedup - removing an un-necessary annoying hang on first-typing (basically caused by poor design of the linguistic/ APIs).
Wrote/sent status report, spent some time on slideware. J.'s Pregnancy Crisis Centre AGM in the evening, hacked away at this & that.

2012-05-13: Sunday

2012-05-13T21:00:00Z

Up late, off to Church, N. off to a party. Ruth spoke on holiness. Chatted to people afterwards; Emily & Beth over for lunch, played in the garden with the babes.
Got everyone kitted up, and tried to train E. to steer a pedal-less bike in the road, against fierce resistance. Finally got somewhere at least, no injuries.
Watched the Princess Bride with the babes; put them to bed, did a little hacking on repsnapper, and up late talking to J.

2012-05-12: Saturday

2012-05-12T21:00:00Z

Up early; packed the babes in the car and set off to Aldeburgh, dropped J. off near Ipswich. On via a diversion to Anne's. Cup of tea.
Out to the boating lake, Bruce had kindly made up four boat-hooks for rescuing model boats (far more fun than the boats themselves it seems); much fun had by all. Went to throw stones at the sea - as you do.
Back for fine lunch, and off to pick J. up, then to hospital in Colchester - went to see him. Home - packed babes off to bed.
Worked until midnight looking at an obscure OLE2 file format / fat chaining issue causing performance issues, the trivial fixes defeated by our regression tests; finally got it.

2012-05-11: Friday

2012-05-11T21:00:00Z

Up, more gut-wrenchingly tedious mail, commit license auditing, wiki statement list updating, etc.
Lovely steak dinner with babes, put them to bed. Worked late.

2012-05-10: Thursday

2012-05-10T21:00:00Z

Up, enjoyed H's PGL assembly - on their adventure activity holiday with the school year recently; fun. Back to E-mail. Lunch. ESC meeting. Dug into Caolans' nice fix for an OLE2 stream reading performance regression caused by some more aggressive security related stream checking, good stuff.
Created an account, more scripting and careful digging through license mails.

2012-05-09: Wednesday

2012-05-09T21:00:00Z

Up lateish; mail, patch review, merge, cherry-picking etc. Dug into grammar checker related slowness from Daniel's nice notes. Poked away at scripting, and mailing people, worked late.

2012-05-08: Tuesday

2012-05-08T21:00:00Z

Up, poked mail, worked through license E-mailage, updating the wiki etc. Got idly curious & poked my pile of perl at my Apache OpenOffice (incubating) git repo. Omitting Rob Weir's checkin of everything, hdu's removal of tango and Andrew Rist's changing of header licenses, it's interesting to see out of the ~66k files in the repo, less than 4k have any other changes: 6% of files changed even slightly, filtering just for .[ch]* the same number - 6% - ho hum.
It is amusing to me that the "developers from over 21 corporate affiliations" advertised by Apache OpenOffice (incubating), are never enumerated; presumably many are co-incidental employers of free-time volunteers rather than official supporters of the project; and odd given the 23 committers in the last year that Ohloh suggests.
Matus got his collaborative editing session going, so we're all set for some Google Summer of Code goodness. Worked away until Lydia & Janice over for dinner.
Worked through bugs with patches in the evening, pushing them to people for review, and merging a good few.

2012-05-07: Monday

2012-05-07T21:00:00Z

Up earlyish; packed everyone into the car and off to the Dinosaur park near Norwich. Played outside on the wonderful climbing facilities, enjoyed the various trails. Had a picnic lunch.
Enjoyed the farm / zoo, sheepdog demonstration, goat feeding, hand-washing, stamping of sheets etc.
Back to the soft-play area - really an impressive new addition to the park: a set of three drop-slides and play areas - in a world where the nanny state bans ever more fun things, big drop-slides for three-year-olds is one thing I didn't enjoy as a child - fun.
Fish and chips on the way home, bed.