[libreoffice-accessibility] Six Months of Freedom and Community

On September 28th, 2010, The Document Foundation was announced. The last 
six months, it feels, have just passed within a short glimpse of time. 
Not only did we release three LibreOffice versions within three months, 
have created the LibreOffice-Box DVD image, and brought LibreOffice 
Portable on its way. We also have announced the LibreOffice Conference 
for October 2011 and have taken part in lots of events worldwide, with 
FOSDEM and CeBIT being the most prominent ones.

People follow us at Twitter, Identi.ca, XING, LinkedIn and a Facebook 
group and fan page, they discuss on our mailing lists with more than 
6.000 subscriptions, collaborate in our wiki, get insight on our daily 
work in our blog, and post and blog themselves. From the very first day, 
openness, transparency and meritocracy have been shaping the framework 
we want to work in. Our discussions and decisions take place on a public 
mailing list, and regularly, we hold phone conferences for the Steering 
Committee and for the marketing teams, where everyone is invited to 
join. Our ideas and visions have made their way into our Next Decade 
Manifesto.

We have joined the Open Invention Network as well as the OpenDoc 
Society, and just last week have become an SPI-associated project, and 
we see a wide range of support from all over the world. Not only do 
Novell and Red Hat support our efforts with developers, but just 
recently, Canonical, creators of Ubuntu, joined as well. All major Linux 
distributions deliver LibreOffice with their operating systems, and more 
follow every day.

One of the most stunning contributions, that still leaves us speechless, 
is the support that we receive from the community. When we asked for 
50,000 € capital stock for a German-based foundation, the community 
showed their support, appreciation and their power, and not only donated 
it in just eight days, but up to now has supported us with close to 
100,000 €! Another one is that driven by our open, vendor neutral 
approach, combined with our easy hacks, we have included code 
contributions from over 150 entirely new developers to the project, 
alongside localisations from over 50 localizers. The community has 
developed itself better than we could ever dream of, and first meetings 
like the project’s weekend or the QA meeting of the Germanophone group 
are already being organized.

What we have seen now is just the beginning of something very big. The 
Document Foundation has a vision, and the creation of the foundation in 
Germany is about to happen soon. LibreOffice has been downloaded over 
350,000 times within the first week, and we just counted more than 1,3 
million downloads just from our download system — not counting packages 
directly delivered by Linux distributors, other download sites or DVDs 
included in magazines and newspapers — supported by 65 mirrors from all 
over the world, and millions already use and contribute to it worldwide. 
With our participation in the Google Summer of Code, we will engage more 
students and young developers to be part of our community. Our improved 
release schedule will ensure that new features and improvements will 
make their way to end-users soon, and for testers, we even provide daily 
builds.

We are so excited by what has been achieved over the last six months, 
and we are immensely grateful to all those who have supported the 
project in whatever ways they can. It is an honour to be working with 
you, to be part of one united community! The future as we are shaping it 
has just begun, and it will be bright and excellent.

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