Introduction

Per decision of our investors, several of our senior highly experienced analysts and developers worked for more than four months on improving OpenOffice.org codebase in platform-independant and unix-oriented parts of various modules, keeping all fixes and improvements they made private to our company (the modifications they've made have never seen the light outside our company - including OOo's issuezilla and any mailing lists).

While our experts, analysts and developers worked with OO, they also were asked to collect wishlists and suggestions for modules they worked with in the free form notes; so currently we have several lists of issues and details they suggested to fix or improve. Also they have accumulated a substantial list of bugs and issues reported by various powerusers who had to use OO/SO for daily tasks - most of the issues didn't go to Issuezilla for various reasons too.

Then our investors decided to abandon this work on improving OOo. Per final decision of our investors, the modifications to OOo made so far won't be released until all expenses incured are compensated. As a users of OpenOffice.org suite and unix-like operating systems, we heartfully wish our modifications to be committed into OpenOffice.org codebase, so we have to invite all parties interested in key desktop software for Unix-like operating systems to be improved, to the joined financial effort in raising compensation for expenses incured by Stunnix.

The sum of expenses to compensate is equal to 18,000 USD in total (this is not the amount of money each member of joined effort has to provide - this is a total). This amount of money will just allow us to release all modifications - fortunately, it shouldn't be very huge sum for members of joined effort. The sum may slightly increase if there will arise additional expenses incured by legal and organizational overhead on receiving compensations by Stunnix. We can't release our modifications (or a part of them) unless we've received a compensation for all expenses we incured. The organizational and technical means for transfering the funds are not yet chosen too, and we would greatly appreciate all recomendations given to us.

We also feel that materials, notes and knoweledge accumulated privately by our developers are of a great value too as a mean to improve OpenOffice.org. We feel it would be optimal if our developers shared their detailed notes, reports and wishitems with community. In this case we will need to gather additional 3,000 USD in total in order to compensate the additional time that our developers will need to spend to organize and submit all notes, reports and wishitems they've collected during work on OOo improvement to OpenOffice.org's issue tracking system - IssueZilla, and to write reports - to help others parties working on OOo improvement to improve OOo even more.

All related to this effort information will be posted or refernced here, at a special section of our site.

We would like to note that Stunnix can continue work on OpenOffice.org improvement provided this work will be sponsored by interested parties. Specialists at Sunnix can provide strategical, technical and architectural analysis, suggestions, recommendations and solutions on the OOo codebase and its snapshots basing on code audit, real-word use testing and informal sources of information (like user mailing lists and forums); help in, control, manage, supervise, audit or lead the bugfixing/improvement and development of parts of OOo that are platform independant or mostly unix-oriented.

We've tried to work the situation out by contacting major distributors or supporters of unix-based desktops before by sending an invitation to them on June 12, 2003, however we haven't received almost any replies. Since there is a little time left before OpenOffice.org-1.1 release, we have to annouce our situation publically. This is our first public announce.

End note

OpenOffice.org is a great software package, also being a key application for desktops running unix-like operating systems. Unfortunately there are a lot of issues that make OpenOffice.org (and thus indirectly desktops running it) inferrior or even unusable in a lot of cases just because of a lot of programming errors, plain lack of testing of all path of control flow or simply lack of real use tests or careful design of algorithms. It's a sad fact that average users are just not movitated or incapable of reporting bugs they find - so there is a need in help from additional extremely professional team like Stunnix experts and developers. We will be glad to help unix-like operating systems vendors, their users and other parties in rising acceptance of OpenOffice.org (and thus the value and acceptance of the platforms that come with OpenOffice.org) by improving OOo. We feel the great importance of our modifications, and it would be a pain if they would be missing in OpenOffice.org 1.1, release of which is scheduled on August 8, 2003 according to
http://tools.openoffice.org/releases/OpenOffice_org_1_x.html .

A list of problems we have to solve

As told above, we are faced with a number of organizational problems with this effort.

Mechanism of trusted fundraising

We can't afford releasing even a part of our modifications without receiving full compensation for all expenses we already incured. So, ideally it would be nice if some trusted third party arranged and probably conducted fund raising, and having received required amount of funds, transferred it to us, receiving in return entire set of modifications. But it looks like the fees that commercial trusted third parties would charge will not be much smaller than sum of expenses we need to compensate.

It's too little time left before OpenOffice.org-1.1 release

We feel that our changes are of big importance and they can't have negative impact on stability of OpenOffice.org, so it would be optimal to include them into OpenOffice.org-1.1 codebase. Given tha there is too little time left before OpenOffice.org-1.1 release, we have a problem of not seeing our modifications in it.

We would very appreciate receiving recommendations on how to solve these problems - please suggest them privately by email to oo-suggestions@stunnix.com or post them on our forums.

While organizational issues are not dealt with, we heartfully ask all interested parties to inform us about their intentions to participate in compensating our expenses, preferrably with outlining amount to be compensated.

Thank in advance for suggestions, hints and contributions!

Vladislav V. Kharchev, CEO of Stunnix
July 2, 2003

Additional resources

The following documents and resources are available on this subject on our site:

Details on modifications made by Stunnix developers.
FAQ on modifications made by Stunnix developers.
A set of forums for discussion of integrating modifications made by Stunnix into OpenOffice.org.
Subscription form for joining read-only mailing list where all progress will be reported.
A dedicated email address - oo-suggestions@stunnix.com - for suggestions and hints.
Initial invitation sent to members of the effort.

You can subscribe to read-only mailing list where progress on modifications made by Stunnix will be reported.