| type=page |
| title=Volunteers, not Amateurs
|
| notice=https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 |
| ~~~~~~ |
| ##Complicated software, developed by volunteers?
|
|
|
| Apache OpenOffice is developed 100% by volunteers. Apache does not pay for developers, for translators, for QA, for marketing, for UI, for support, etc. Of course, we're
|
| happy to accept [donations to the Apache Software Foundation][1], to keep our servers running and for similar overhead expenses. But our products are developed entirely by volunteers.
|
|
|
| Some users are initially worried by this statement. How can software for free, developed by volunteers, be any good?
|
|
|
| ##Talent as deep as any corporation
|
|
|
| OpenOffice, through its decade plus existence, has had, and continues to benefit from the contributions of many professionals. Some are sponsored by their employers to volunteer
|
| with the project. At one time or another Sun, Oracle, Novell, Redhat, IBM and others have sponsored their employees to work on OpenOffice. Some professional are recently retired
|
| and work on the project to keep their skills sharp or to "give back" to the open source community. Others have a business based on OpenOffice consulting, and volunteer with the
|
| project to stay close to potential customers. Others are students, studying software engineering or a related field, and participate in our project as a form of electronic
|
| internship. Among our volunteers are several programmers with over a decade's experience working on OpenOffice. We are fortunate to have a depth of talent working on this project
|
| that would be the envy of many corporations.
|
|
|
| So our all-volunteer principle is a statement of how we are organized, as a non-profit. We do not pay for developers. But this is not a statement on the professionalism and
|
| talent of our volunteers. In fact, very few corporations would be able to afford the kind of talent that we have, as volunteers, helping with Apache OpenOffice.
|
|
|
| ##Join us!
|
|
|
| If you have skills in programming, quality assurance, translation, technical writing, graphic design, marketing or related disciplines, then you can make difference by
|
| [volunteering with the Apache OpenOffice project][2]. With the generous contributions of your time and talent, we can make OpenOffice even better!
|
|
|
| [1]: http://www.apache.org/foundation/contributing.html
|
| [2]: http://openoffice.apache.org/get-involved.html
|
