Merging Communities

Come together, right now

-- Beatles, Abbey Road, Come together

So September, 28th 2016 is the 6th birthday of LibreOffice and at the recent conference, we took a picture of those who were there on day zero:

As you might notice, I am not on that picture -- on day zero I was working at Oracle, and were surprised by the news -- like many others in this picture:

This is everyone at this years LibreOffice conference who used to work on the OpenOffice.org codebase at StarDivision, Sun or Oracle. A few people are in both pictures: Caolán McNamara and Thorsten Behrens were with LibreOffice from the start, but also worked at the OpenOffice.org team in Hamburg at some point in time. Of those working on OpenOffice.org still when LibreOffice started, I was the first to join LibreOffice -- I had quit my job for that. It was an exciting time.

Looking back, both of these groups appear small -- mostly because merging them, the LibreOffice community became so much more that the sum of its parts:

And of course, while a lot of people were at the conference, not everyone could join, so there are more contributors from each of these groups than are in the pictures. This years "state of the project" presentation showed again that the members of The Document Foundation are a truly worldwide community:

So, like the branches of the different descendants of OpenOffice.org, the contributors and communities did come together in Brno to push LibreOffice forward as one!

Originally published on 2016-09-28 10:58:37 on wordpress.