{"id":1029,"date":"2013-01-10T13:06:12","date_gmt":"2013-01-10T13:06:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/xislblogs.xtreamlab.net\/slwoods\/?p=1029"},"modified":"2013-01-10T13:08:18","modified_gmt":"2013-01-10T13:08:18","slug":"the-long-tail-of-libreoffice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/?p=1029","title":{"rendered":"The long tail of LibreOffice"},"content":{"rendered":"

In recent years, the term ‘long tail<\/a>‘, which was originally coined in 2004 by Chris Anderson, has certainly caught on. Anderson’s coining of the phrase drew on a February 2003 essay by Clay Shirky<\/a> entitled “Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality”, which noted that a relatively few blogs have many links to them, but there’s a “the long tail” of millions of blogs with only a handful of links each. Anderson described the effects of the long tail on current and future business models and later developed it into a book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More<\/em>, published in 2006.<\/p>\n

You may be asking what has all this to do with LibreOffice<\/a>, the popular open source office suite? Well, the Document Foundation<\/a>, the organisation behind LibreOffice, has recently published a blog post showing a long tail graph<\/a> in relation to the developers working on LibreOffice.<\/p>\n

\"image<\/a>
The long tail in action on LibreOffice. Click on the image for a full size version. Image courtesy of The Document Foundation<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The image depicts developers who worked on LibreOffice’s code base in 2012. Last year a total some 320 developers worked on improving LibreOffice’s code. Of these, a majority were volunteers and a minority were people paid by major open source companies such as SuSE<\/a>, RedHat<\/a> and Canonical<\/a>, as well as many smaller organisations such as Lanedo<\/a>, which provides customisation services for open source products such as LibreOffice.<\/p>\n

The graph of the individual contributions has the shape of a “long tail”, whilst the pie chart illustrates the work done by the top 33 developers with 100+ commits, consisting of 16 volunteers and 17 paid developers (11 from SUSE, 5 from RedHat and 1 from Canonical).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In recent years, the term ‘long tail‘, which was originally coined in 2004 by Chris Anderson, has certainly caught on. Anderson’s coining of the phrase drew on a February 2003 essay by Clay Shirky entitled “Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality”, which noted that a relatively few blogs have many links to them, but there’s a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4,5,9],"tags":[16,19,24,12,23],"class_list":["post-1029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-translation-and-language-related-matters","category-linux-and-os-matters","category-open-source-software","category-tech","tag-english-usage","tag-free-software","tag-odf","tag-open-source","tag-tech-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1029"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1029\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1034,"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1029\/revisions\/1034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}