[odf-discuss] One month in the life of the Fellowship

[Daniel Carrera]

Hello all,

A lot has gone on in the last month. Much of it has not been on this
list, and I wanted to make sure everyone knew what's up at the
Fellowship. So here is a summary of what's been happening recently.

Some of this you know, some of it you don't, please do read.

- We started an "ODF Tools" project, to complement the ODF viewer:
http://opendocumentfellowship.org/development/projects/odftools

- We held discussions with large donors about funding development
projects for ODF. We received $37,000 in donations:
http://opendocumentfellowship.org/development/projects

- The Project Committee posted the first tender, valued at $11,500, to
develop an HTML-to-ODF converter, to be added to the ODF Tools.
http://opendocumentfellowship.org/development/projects/html2odf

- The Project Committee voted to contract the developer who wrote the
ODF viewer (Alex) to add features and polish. We're currently discussing
what features will be added.

- ANOTHER DONOR will lend us a brand new iBook for developing the Mac OS
X port of the ODF viewer. As part of the deal, I will attempt an
ODF-to-iWork converter. This agreement will save us a lot on the OS X
viewer port. So we can direct the funds elsewhere.

- We are having discussions with a news agency about allowing us to use
their channels to send press releases to many journalists.

- We are having discussions with a company the specializes in search
engine optimization about donating their services to the Fellowship.

- David Wheeler has done a fantastic job with the $7,000 donation for
OpenFormula. He's recruited two new developers into the Formula SC and
several existing developers have started working on funded tasks.

Incidentally, I'd like to thank Gary Edward's OpenDocument Foundation
for making the OASIS TC accessible to Fellowship members and other
individuals. Thanks Gary!!

- We had informal contact with the Software Freedom Law Center about the
OpenDocument icon. I'd like to summarize what they said:

  * They advised us to trademark the ODF icon. Failure to do so will
allow misuse of the icon (e.g. to dilute its connection with ODF).
  * Copyright licensing is irrelevant, there are no copyrights in icons.
  * Sadly, they can't represent us or offer any help beyond this advise.

We will now try to find the most permissive trademark license we can. We
don't want to be like Firefox, where many distros don't ship their logo
because of the trademark.

Pete has suggested this license: "Permission to use and/or modify this
image for the promotion of the OpenDocument Format is granted provided
you acknowledge me (Pete Harlow) and the GIMP if someone asks."

I guess that a good step now would be to talk to a couple of distros to
find something that they are happy with. Distributions regularly ship
the Linux logo, which is trademarked. So, as long as we pick something
at least as permissive as that it should be ok.

Cheers,
Daniel.
-- 
"I AM in shape. Round IS a shape."
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