CollabNet Helps OpenOffice.org Surpass 170,000 Registered Members

Market Wire, October, 2004

CollabNet, the leading provider of on demand distributed software development solutions and host to the OpenOffice.org community, today announced it has helped OpenOffice.org surpass its 170,000 registered member mark, further solidifying its place as the world's most successful corporate-initiated and sponsored open-source project.

Despite being four years old, OpenOffice.org continues to grow as the world's leading open-source office productivity suite. Initiated in 2000 by Sun Microsystems to engage the open-source community in developing the product, an open-source version of Sun's StarOffice, OpenOffice.org's community now contains not only individual contributors but also developers from Novell, RedHat and Good-Day, as well as many government-sponsored organizations. Today, tens of millions of people use the product in over 50 languages and on every major platform, including Windows, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X and FreeBSD.

"One of the characteristics that has made OpenOffice.org so successful is its international scale and ability to bring together people from all over the world to work in concert in a single development environment," said Brian Behlendorf, founder and CTO of CollabNet and a founder of the Apache Software Foundation. "CollabNet has provided the necessary collaborative environment to allow thousands of multilingual and culturally diverse developers to work together on this project, regardless of geographic location, and in their native languages."

Since its inception, CollabNet has hosted the OpenOffice.org project on its collaborative development platform, which was built on open-source principles. The CollabNet environment provides the ideal platform for open source and distributed development because it is methodology-neutral yet responds to the development needs common among all programming methodologies. It increases developer efficiency and productivity by providing a universal development environment that does not force users to conform to rigid, tool-imposed processes, but rather allows them to take advantage of their individual skill sets and personalized development practices.

With such a massive group of people working on the OpenOffice.org project, the management and governance of the project are critical to ensure coherence of projects and minimal duplication effort. To foster this success, OpenOffice.org appointed a community manager who is responsible for coordinating community collaboration and driving project strategy. In addition, OpenOffice.org is also governed by an elected Community Council which determines key policy and resolves issues, and legitimates the processes of the project. The Community Manager is currently the chair of the Community Council.

"The thousands working on OpenOffice.org are usually doing so because they want to include a feature or resolve a bug, and their interests may not conform with the needs of others or they may overlap or get lost," said Louis Suarez-Potts, senior community development manager at CollabNet and the community manager and chair of the Community Council at OpenOffice.org. "As Community Manager, my goal is to ensure that the project work remains consistent, that group tensions are profitably resolved, and that work done by the community proceeds smoothly and efficiently."

CollabNet's collaborative development tools also support OpenOffice.org's non-technical community with its marketing and business development efforts. The first of all open-source projects to establish a marketing project, OpenOffice.org's community marketing efforts today account for all marketing done by OpenOffice.org, including press releases, collateral, images, and case studies. And, given the international nature of the project, all key marketing efforts are translated into over two dozen languages and distributed throughout the world by a cadre of marketing contacts.

Besides hosting the OpenOffice.org community, CollabNet also hosts open-source community development projects for a number of the world's largest technology companies, including Intel, BEA Systems, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein and Sun Microsystems. Its development environment is helping these companies dramatically lower the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of creating business applications by reducing development time through sharing and reuse of applications, and speeding overall time-to-market through collaborative software development and open-source principles.

The CollabNet environment is providing companies with real-time insight into the overall application development lifecycle and delivering process predictability that allows teams to mitigate business risks. Clients are using the CollabNet platform to address today's most pressing development challenges including offshore development, project co-development with partners, geographically distributed software projects, projects involving Web Services and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) development, and software asset reuse.

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