mardi, décembre 22, 2009

OpenOffice.org Education Project and Epitech Paris students

The great story between Epitech Paris and OpenOffice.org, for instance OpenOffice.org Education Project, representing OpenOffice.org Proejct, of course, continued this year.

What happened ?

Last year, was Pierre Pasteau, who contributed to the moz2seamonkey migration. Thanks to Frank Schonheit who helped us a lot btw.

This year, we had two other students, Thomas Fontenay and Abelkader Belabbes, who did a great work too. The work they did, was to port OOo4Kids to the XO

Note: port OpenOffice.org directly is not an option, because an XO machine does only have 1GB of Hard disk, and 256 MB or RAM only, while OOo set is already 400MB :-)


Some will say this is not a directly visible result, but in fact, this is an extremely important result : Realize this XO port connected OpenOffice.org Community directly with XO / OLPC Community !! (like provide gdium suppport connected us to the OLPH community too)

Indeed, from one side, the .odf is essential, and from another, it must be considered that the students learned a lot of OpenOffice.org source code, in a short time. Learn the code first, is essential to my eyes. If they had to dive into QA, specs (what basically does mostly concern Sun employees), six month would have been too short. The other good effect, is that the OpenOffice.org Project yet built a strong link with an engineer school.

In fact, that's exactly what we did with Ecole Centrale Nantes, and UTBM .

The difficulty is that create such bridges with schools is extremely long, needs a lot of energy, but, in return, creates a very positive image of the project, and can really help to find developers (remember, the code is the blood of a free software, not "politics ").

Just a bit of patience, and the future will be better !


Last but not least, we received several machines, exactly 3 XO-1.5 for the next coming students. The plan is to profile and try to improve Impress performances (the request is very high for the netbooks), and propose a backport in OpenOffice.org, if the code desserves it.

Those machines are reserved to the two first students (from France prefered), able to find a prof (mandatory) to make the link with the school.

any candidate(s) ?

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