Now it’s official: as the vote closed before a few minutes, nearly 50 ASF Incubator PMC members have voted. About 40 with “yes”, others with “no”. 57 non binding votes (Non-ASF persons or people not on the Incubator PMC) have raised their voice too, with 45 “yes”. The amount of votes is amazing. I cannot imagine when so many votes have been casted in the past.
With 86 “yes” against 15 “nos” (I have not included +/-0s) the matter is clear: OpenOffice.org has now joined the ranks of the Incubator Podlings. In the next time user accounts will be created, required resources will be set up (like svn or wikis) and a Podling PMC will be established. Soon (hopefully) the code will be dumped into the SVN repository. Guess it will take a while.
What OOo now needs is a good start.
The podling committers should not forget about the worries which has been brought up even while voting time. Everybody who voted with -1 took the chance to summarize why he did so. In nearly all cases they had good reasons. Some of them were of political nature, some of them on technical. They have right in one point: OpenOffice.org is unique to the ASF. It is actually something new. The ASF will need to solve problems they have not had before. The new podling needs to take care on all these points and try to become a stable environment as soon as possible. Once this has been gained, most critic should be gone.
With motivated contributors and committers we might be able to bring everything to fly. “It cannot be done because it has not been done before” - this is cannot be true. If that would be true, many innovations would not exist.
Let us see what the next 3 month will bring. This might be the time frame in which we learn if this was a good or a bad decision.
Now, after OpenOffice.org has been given from Oracle to the Apache Software Foundation I would like to see Oracle would give a TCK license to Apache Harmony. :-)
Good luck everybody, a lot of fun with OpenOffice.org - and welcome to the ASF.