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About Stunnix

We are a company specializing in high-quality custom development of complex projects and solutions that are platform-independant or oriented for unix-like platforms. We also have a great experience in making already-existing software internationalization-aware and truly usable for international users, including internal document representation, user interface, printing and import/export support for third party file formats. Also we have a wide experience working as system integrators and independant software vendors of software for unix-like operating systems (by the way, mostly oriented towards GNOME desktop environment). Some information about us is available here:
http://www.stunnix.com/about/?main2

The joined effort

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 decided to invite you, one of topmost companies that are in business of distributing Unix-like operating systems, 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 all members of joined effort. The sum may slightly increase if there will arise additional expenses incured by legal and organizational overhead on receiving compensations. However, we would recommend members of effort to gather additional 3,000 USD in total in order to compensate the additional time that our developers will need to organize and submit all notes, reports and wishitems they've collected during work on OOo improvement to OpenOffice.org issue tracking system - IssueZilla, and to write reports - to help others parties working on OOo improvement to improve OOo even more.

We didn't announce this joined effort in public, we can do this in case members of effort will see the need for this. All related to this effort information (including this document) will be posted at a private section of our site that was not announced anywhere else:
    http://www.stunnix.com/priv/oo/

Also we are proud to announce to the members of the effort a partnership with Stunnix, per which Stunnix highly experienced analysts, experts and developers, that are to be sponsored by members of joined effort, will 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.

Detailed information on modifications

As all Stunnix products and services, the modifications are of high quality and clear of structure. All modifications are adapted to and tested (in Linux RedHat73 x86 environment) on OpenOffice.org source code tagged with tag 644_M11 in OpenOffice.org's CVS. Modifications come as a set of unified patch files, each patch having (in comments on top of the file) description of its purpose. Each patch file deals with as distinct issue as possible, this approach allows to see the set of changes affecting a distinct issue, though it increases a number of patch files. Since such approach resulted in several patch files existing for the same source file, all patch files have special convention for their names that allows to distinguish what project patch file applies to, in which order a patch should be applied to the project, and what issue it addresses (in human words, not an Issuezilla's issue number). All patches can be consequently and cleanly applied to the OO's source from CVS tagged 644_M11. There are more than half of hundred patch files totalling 210 kbytes in size. Our developers are able to describe the purpose of each patch in a great detail. At the end of this document you will find a rough description of modifications.

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 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 .

Appendix: description of modifications

Here are highlights of our modifications:

• A lot of MathType export and import fixes making OpenOffice.org's component responsible among other things for importing and exporting of equations in MSOffice documents (without our fixes, import and export of equations is very far from perfect, for some cases import and export just doesn't work)
• A lot of fixes for import and export filters to various MSOffice and a lot of other formats with respect to correct handling of non-latin1 (international) characters
• A lot of fixes for import and export filters to various file formats that fix other very severe bugs
• A lot of critical fixes for unix printing subsystem
• A lot of fixes for web browser included with OOo
• A lot of very important unix-specific desktop-neutral improvements and some bugfixes for VCL (the module used for graphical user interface of OpenOffice.org - it's responsible for behaviour and look of buttons, checkboxes, lists and all other basic GUI elements).
• Very critical improvements for keyboard shortcuts handling for unix (without which OOo is a pain to use in a lot of countries)
• A lot of miscelaneous fixes and improvements for various components