Brothers in Arms

But it’s written in the starlight
And every line on your palm
We’re fools to make war
On our brothers in arms

— Dire Straits, Brothers in Arms

As the LibreOffice project grows, the distance between teams and subprojects also grows. This makes it increasingly important to keep our efforts united and not tolerate behaviour that makes members feel attacked,
even if the originators believe they are simply being direct or mischievous. We’re a diverse, multi-cultural and multi-lingual community, and it’s easy to unintentionally offend through choices of expression that differ from what’s anticipated.

We’re a single community, and creating the concept of others – and the  promotion of a “them vs. us” mentality — in our team is dangerous and will hurt us in the long run. Some basic guidelines to this regard are set out in the statutes of the Document Foundation. If something more explicit is needed the Ubuntu code of conduct gives a good overview of what to take care of in the project.

Unfortunately, there recently have been repeated incidents on bugzilla which violate this principle. Joel has thus been given permissions to suspend users on bugzilla temporarily if it proves necessary. We hope that friendly corrections to tone and messaging, then warnings and finally the threat of such suspension will be enough, and there will be no need for action to be taken.

Instant Karma — a pledge and a plea, part 2

“Instant Karma’s gonna get you

Gonna knock you right on the head”

– John Lennon, Instant Karma

As I said a month ago:

“As I firmly believe freedom to be essential regardless of scale or context, I hereby pledge to donate 10 Euro to witness.org for every power of 2 in Euros donated to the Document Foundation in December 2012.”

So as the number are in now lets check how far we got with that:

Donations to the Document Foundation in December 2012 What I pledged to donate to witness.org for that

more than 1 €

10 €

more than 2 €

20 €

more than 4 €

30 €

more than 8 €

40 €

more than 16 €

50 €

more than 32 €

60 €

more than 64 €

70 €

more than 128 €

80 €

more than 256 €

90 €

more than 512 €

100 €

more than 1024 €

110 €

more than 2048 €

120 €

more than 4096 €

130 €

more than 8192 €

140 €

more than 16,384 €

150 €

In total, the donations to the Document Foundation in December 2012 amounted to:

21,711 €

To everyone who donated: Thank you very much!

I donated 225$ to witness.org yesterday, which more than covers my pledge. So this is completed and I am quite happy how much we can achieve together — you can see on the board-dicuss list, how these donations are intended to be spend in 2013. We will get lots of Hackers and Contributors to Hackfests and events and thereby make LibreOffice even better! To please keep the donations coming:

donate

Here is how some Hackfests look like:

Hackfest Munich 2012
Hackday Brazil 2012
LibreOffice Conference 2012, Berlin
LibreOffice Conference 2012, Berlin

Oh, and: LibreOffice will be at FOSDEM 2013 in a few weeks like every year so far!