It is rumored that adding new features to OpenOffice.org is very hard or close to impossible for volunteer developers if that feature is not already a part of ODF, the file format OpenOffice.org uses for its documents. I think this is unfounded rumor, but understanding that needs some explanations.

ODF is under control of the ODF Technical Committee(TC) at OASIS, an important non-profit consortium that drives the development of open standards in the industry. This implies that extensions of and changes to this standard must be done following the OASIS rules. This is especially important for intellectual property (IP) and licensing issues. Simply put (skipping the lengthy description of boring legal details) the IPR Policy of OASIS doesn't allow a TC member to post an enhancement proposal to the TC's mailing list if the proposal is not his own idea. Instead of that it requires that the author of the proposal submits it to the OASIS ODF TC himself. This is the reason why we (the Sun developers working on OpenOffice.org) don't propose ODF enhancements brought up by Non-Sun OpenOffice.org developers, but ask them to post the proposals to a particular mailing list that every OASIS TC has in place to get feedback and suggestions from non-TC members. [1]

Posting to this “comment list“ does not require an OASIS membership, only an IP statement regarding the posted topic is required. The TC then will pick the proposal up and discuss it, in the same way as a proposal of a member. And in the same way as we help developers to integrate their code if they send us a patch, all OpenOffice.org developers[2] in the TC will help them to contribute their ODF suggestions if they post them to the comment list. To show you that this is not pure speculation, here's a real life example for this.

One of our long-time contributors, Giuseppe Castagno, wanted to implement a feature for OpenOffice.org Writer: the Table Of Content should be able to add chapter numbers in front of page numbers so that a TOC like the following could be created:

Please refer to issue 53420 for further reference. We discussed the situation and Giuseppe agreed to post a suggestion to the comment list. After some discussion this was accepted as a proposal and three weeks later the proposal was accepted to become included into the next ODF version.

Admittedly it was a little bit more work to do than just hacking, it required some thinking and writing do describe the feature in a way that its file format specification lives up to the ODF standard. IMHO the result clearly justifies this additional effort: users and applications benefit from the standards work and the developer now not only has contributed some code to OpenOffice.org but also has its own share of the development of an industry standard!

Perhaps you are now curious about the feature that will be part of ODF 1.2. Well, after taking a break of a few months Giuseppe started to specify and implement the feature in close cooperation with Oliver Wittmann (Development), Frank Meies (Development), Frank Loehmann (UX), Michael Ruess (QA) and Uwe Fischer (Documentation) from Sun. The work was finished and integrated into the DEV300_m2 milestone and so will be available in the OOo 3.0 Beta. Giuseppe's work is great and I will take this opportunity to thank him in public for this work and all the other patches we got from him in the past.

Thanks, Giuseppe!

[1] Just to avoid misunderstandings: of course we still will support such proposals from others in the TC if we find them useful.

[2] Of course I can speak only for the Sun developers here but I assume that the same is true for other TC members working on OpenOffice.org (e.g. people from Novell or IBM)