As an every day user of open source products both at work and at home, I feel obligated to give back to those who donate their time and energy for the greater good of computing. I have chosen to join the OpenOffice community and assist in Marketing and Quality Assurance. I have been using OpenOffice for years. I have many computers with various operating systems (Kubuntu, Linux Mint, PCLinuxOS, Mepis, XP, and Vista) and OpenOffice runs flawlessly on all of them. I have written about my experience with Open Office at work in the popular post Open Source and Microsoft Free. Like many corporations, my company uses Windows XP and Microsoft Office. I use Kubuntu and OO and have had very few issues exchanging documents with others both inside and outside the organization. I know that the quality of this product is the direct result of the hard work and dedication of many volunteers throughout the world. Now it's my turn to give back.
I will be working with the volunteers of the Marketing team and sharing information here on my blog from time to time. As a QA volunteer, I will log issues that I find myself or that are sent to me from my readers. So if you have any issues you would like to log please contact me at mkavis@yahoo.com so I can get the details.
In the mean time, let me share some information with all of you. For those of you who are new to OO, I have included some screen shots of the different tools the OO has to offer.
For you bloggers out there who use OO, go here to get banners to add to your blog like I have. I have also encouraged my team to contribute to an open source project of their choice. Not only will that allow my company to give back to communities that we reap benefits from, but it also gives us experience working with a very collaborative project environment. I believe that companies can learn a lot about how to successfully deliver software by experiencing the collaboration that goes into a release of open source software.
For those of you who use open source software on a regular basis, I encourage you to contribute. There are many ways to participate:
- Donate
- Develop
- Test
- Document
- Marketing
- Support
- Translations
