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<h2>OSCON Wrap Up</h2>
<p>
-<a href="/lspintro.html">Louis Suarez-Potts</a>
</p>

<p>2003-07-16</p>


<p>What follows is a brief account of OpenOffice.org's days at OSCON 2003, 
which took place last week in a sweltering Portland, Oregon, USA.
</p>

<p>
To begin with OSCON (Open Source Convention) this year has focused on 
enterprise and open source.  The conference has been fascinating and 
exciting--mainly developers but developers who recognize the next step 
for open source is the enterprise.... And guess which open-source 
project has bee cited, touted, mentioned, discussed?
</p>

<p>
But the focus on OpenOffice.org has not been without critique.  And it 
has been the best sort.  Over the next week I'll be highlighting some 
of the more interesting comments, but first, a belated report on OOo 
days at OSCON.
</p>

<p>
OSCON, for those not in the know, is where Open Source (with capital 
letters) began, in 1998, and it remains the defining meeting of the 
year.  This year, Tim O'Reilly set the official tenor of the conference 
with a packed presentation on where Open Source Software (OSS) is 
heading and how it is evolving. He calls it, following Thomas Kuhn's 
famous phrase regarding "revolutions" in scientific understandings, a 
"paradigm shift":  "One of the greatest challenges for open source in 
the next few years is to understand and adapt to the paradigm shift 
implicit in network computing, and to shed the legacy thinking of the 
desktop era."  The potential is enormous; the limiting factor is not 
having open standards. Open standards, distinct from open source, which 
describes a work method, allow for radical interoperability.
</p>

<p>
Tim's presentation underscored the importance of collaboration and 
networks; other presentations and panels focused on technical and 
abstract problems relating to open-source technology and 
implementation.  I was most interested in those that either touched on 
OpenOffice.org as a product, project, and exemplar. For OpenOffice.org 
is not just an open-source project working without a clear organization 
but a defined corporate-initiated and corporate-sponsored project with 
structure and organization.
</p>

<p>
In our presentation, Danese Cooper, Sun's Open Source Diva, and I 
elucidated OpenOffice.org's structure and emphasized Sun's support for 
involvement in the project by the open-source community.  We addressed 
questions from developers interested in contributing, from people 
curious about the enterprise/open-source community relationship, and 
from general users wondering about this application they have heard so 
much about.  Later in the day, I moderated a BOF (birds of a feather) 
panel in which we discussed "most wanted" features and elements. I'll 
be discussing the results of both conversations later.  They are 
interesting.
</p>

<p>
In addition to our presentations, OpenOffice.org also maintained a 
*very* active booth in the Sun pod, which was prominently placed.  
Thanks to Phillip "Flip" Russell, we had hundreds of CDROMs to 
distribute. I went through all of them.  Everyone was encouraging and 
supportive, and I was able to snag the business cards of many 
developers who expressed interest in contributing their efforts.
</p>

<p>
And this was partly the point of attending this conference: to entice 
the open-source community to work on OpenOffice.org.  Why?
</p>

<p>
Because we want OpenOffice.org to be better. The point is not that open 
source products work. That, at this point, is a given.  The point is 
that OpenOffice.org should be the best. We should be judged not our 
mere existence but on our capability; on what we do. Judge us on our 
merits not on how well we copy somebody else.  Why be tied to the 
proprietary imagination? Open source is about innovation and newness. 
Let's make it new.
</p>

<p>Links</p>
	<li><a href="http://www.onlamp.com/oscon2003/">O'Reilly Network OSCON News</a></li>

<p>
Louis Suárez-Potts
Community Manager
OpenOffice.org 
</p>
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