Some problems.

One clarification since it caused some private questions:

  Collabora - despite C'bra still putting a lot of work into
LibreOffice Desktop, having an outstanding support capability, doing
lots of marketing, being the largest code contributor to LibreOffice,
and having lots of existing happy customers / references for desktop
LibreOffice, ... etc. etc.

  We have not had -one- -single- -new- Collabora *Office*
customer since 2018 - zero.

  I think Thorsten stated more cleanly as:

  "The market for desktop libreoffice is tough;
   sales cycles frequently count in multiple years"

I'd blame the lack of sales on Collabora having a really bad website
(https://www.collaboraoffice.com), in respect to LibreOffice, Collabora
Office, and CODE. Start with the (United States? Canadian? Caribbean?)
$18/month/seat for an SMB. Is that the online edition, or the desktop
edition? Is that Tier 1 or Tier 2 support? The Tier 3 support page is
understandable, until you discover that despite asterisks, there is no
definition of either "high" or "medium". It doesn't help that there are
two grammatical errors on that page. (Since I'm being picky, there also
is a spelling error on one of the other pages.) No pricing in British
Pounds, despite being an English company?!?!?!

And of course for us Collabora Online is the tip of the spear for
investment & expected returns, with education being a key sector
currently. We have a growing set of customers there.

Wandering through https://www.colaboraoffice.com, I would never have
guessed that education was considered to be a key sector. Nor would I
know that Collabora GovOffice is claimed to be a key component of their
offerings.

As far as education goes, Collabora looks like they have created
plug-ins that easily enable IT to incorporate Collabora Online into
various commonly used environments in the academic and corporate world.
Not a mention of those plug-ins, or how they enhance each other, in
either their testimonials or white paper.

Is TDF/LibreOffice supposed to be doing marketing for and on behalf of
Collabora, Multiracio, etc?

jonathon

Hi

sorry by being late on this.

Nevertheless there are some big problems currently. Perhaps
you think you have a neat solution to one of them. I'd love to hear
about it - but solving or obsessing about just one is unlikely to do
the job:

Ok, then some of my ideas to do by TDF

TLTR?: Become a professional managed organization (or or at least create a sufficient professionalized organizational segment - "from professionals for professionals"). Which also means: Take the tight resources of the TDF not to solve every problem in a do-it-yourself mentality but to get them solved with/by professional help.
Teach people that LibreOffice is not the gratis version of MS Office but a real great idea which they can and shall support in various ways. Till this field, then economic returns can be seeded and grow there; and this is something TDF can do. Don't try to force the TDF to do what it cannot (by statutes and/or by law) do; if it is a really important issue, create an independent structure for it.

Full Text:

1. Pay a ~professional to deliver a migration white paper for small, medium an large enterprises respectively. With does clearly mention the advantages of a professional support contract. With professional layout and management summary and whatever else it takes to get it read by a lot of interested people. Base this on a sound analysis of requirements, not only on marketing labels (as written somewhere else).
Therefor look for advice from marketing experts (NOT of sales or PR or communication or the like professionals who call themselves "marketing expert"!) (sorry Italo, you are undoubtedly a highly qualified communications professional, but you're not doing marketing in my sense).

1a. Even if they are true, avoid statements like "...and can significantly reduce the Total Cost of Ownership of enterprise PCs because it replaces the license cost with a substantially lower migration cost" in an official document (LibreOffice Migration Protocol, p. 1 in this case)! Anyhow, the migration protocol seems to be a good starting point.

2. Pay a full time LO developer to do mentoring workshops on a regular base, embedded by a communication campaign also led by a PR ~professional, advertising these workshops in local (modern social) media. I. e.: For Germany/DACH rent Linux hotel for one week and offer a hacking LO workshop there for (nearly) free - and advertise that widely in DACH media (not only IT centered ones), based on a ~sound media analysis of what is read by our targeted group. Both effects - educating/recruiting programmers and having a widespread LO image campaign - will be worth the money.
Besides that we still suffer from the "OpenOffice - oops, I meant LibreOffice"-effect (OpenOffice meant a as class of software, not perceived as a distinct product vs. LibreOffice) and still have to establish the right name for the right product by an image campaign.
Develop this an a "standard"-module (by documentation, standard teaching material, checklist, do's and don'ts...) to encourage local communities to copy that for their country (similar as the conference is a teamwork between la local community and a professional, experienced orga-team at TDF). Send them the developer in case of need.

3. Pay a ~professional organization to deliver a basic set of training materials under a CC license (i.e. attribution share-alike). Which may then been translated by the community - or enterprises using them. Lack of local training capabilities often seem to be the bottleneck of migration projects, so we should enforce them.

5. Set up a professional qualification structure (like lpi) with certificates and all this stuff. At least give the picture of doing so.
"LibreOffice Certification is completely different from commercial certification... TDF is looking for LibreOffice Ambassadors, able to provide value-added professional services to grow the LibreOffice ecosystem."[1] is a nice try but will not foster commercial organizations to trust in - rather to get suspicious.

6. Stop trying to use TDF as a selling point. Won't work and even worse damage the project. It's ok to express concerns where TDF is standing in the way of business (or "ecosystem") interests and helping it stepping aside. But having the managers in charge of all of the tree "ecosystem partners" mentioned on our website [2] as members of the BoD leaves me pondering.
Perhaps we should also put a definition of what is an "ecosystem partner" (and what to do to become one) on that page.
btw: this page [2] should imho not be in "downloads" but in "Discover".

6. ...still thinking...

[1] https://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/certification/
[2] https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/

Thanks for the appreciation as communications professional. By the way
during my career I have been Vice President Marketing for Honeywell IS,
which at the time was second only to IBM in the computer business, then
- as a consultant - Marketing Manager Europe for Adobe, in charge of all
activities for PDF and Photoshop (both products were not doing so bad)
from 1989 to 1999, when I was hired by Macromedia to launch the Internet
product suite (Dreamweaver and all the associated products, but that was
indeed a less successful experience), and then I moved - always as a
consultant - to Dell in Italy until 2004.

I have been in marketing roles from 1981 to 2004, or 23 years, although
for quite some time I have had a different "formal" role as the company
I was working for was not focused on marketing specific consultancy.

I have attended a master training course about B2B Marketing at General
Electric Management School in Crotonville (NY) when I was at Honeywell,
and I have a BA in Marketing Management at ISTUD in Italy.

Of course, I respect your opinion about my limited marketing skills, so
this is just for your info.

Hi Uwe,

TLTR?: Become a professional managed organization

  I imagine it's not just Italo that has concerns with that =)

Teach people that LibreOffice is not the gratis version of MS
Office but a real great idea which they can and shall support
in various ways.

  Totally behind that; marketing more of the project and less of a gratis
product.

Till this field, then economic returns can be seeded and grow there;
and this is something TDF can do.

  Clearly we need to educate people.

Don't try to force the TDF to do what it cannot (by statutes
and/or by law) do

  Of course.

if it is a really important issue, create an independent
structure for it.

  The ecosystem though has a lot of competing independent structures,
each with different strengths, and interest in bringing LibreOffice to
different niches. Clearly having more players there would be good,
though having a single hyper-privileged one would not. But possibly new
structures are needed I suppose.

  ATB,

    Michael.

Hi Italo

but you're not doing marketing in my sense.

Thanks for the appreciation as communications professional. By the way
during my career I have been..and I have a BA in Marketing Management at ISTUD in Italy.

Of course, I respect your opinion about my limited marketing skills, so
this is just for your info.

Very interesting, didn't know in detail - but I've always known you're good in what you're doing :slight_smile:
What I mean is more about effectiveness vs. efficiency: It's no question that your doing an excellent job in what you're doing - but are you doing the right things (which for sure wasn't alone your decision what to do)?

Coming back to "doing marketing in my sense": So you can point me to a sound analysis of requirements of our market from which our product development as well as our market communication is coherently derived? Very interested in reading that.

Of course, we have never performed such an analisys, because we have a
peculiar development process which is IMHO rather difficult to steer
according to the usual marketing process.

I did try to do a similar exercise when I joined the community in 2004
(with a limited community and zero FOSS development experience), and I
was told that it was a loss of time as the development was following a
different path.

So, I have tried to flip the approach and promote the product as it is
and build a narrative to provide the missing user focus (the MUFFIN I
invented for the UX is a good example of this approach).

Yes, it is not the ideal approach. Yes, we should identify the user
clusters, and for each user cluster have a list of features which have
to be included, and schedule their development/announcement over the
life of a release.

Is this possible? Based on our development model, I do not think it is
possible. We know that in Bugzilla there are end user requests for new
features which have been sitting there for years, because either there
was no request from the same feature by enterprises willing to pay for
them, and there were no developers willing to work on them.

So, either we decide - and this is entirely possible - to invest some
money on TDF sponsored features, which reflect user needs, and at that
time we spend time to figure out the features by looking at requests,
and cross checking them with the needs of user clusters, or we risk to
spend time in a very interesting activity (I still remember having fun
during planning sessions at Honeywell, with heated discussions on the
opportunity to offer user visibility on the paper path inside laser
printers, which was a killer feature I imposed to engineers, being the
only one using printers in the group) without any visible result.

Having a limited amount of time, I have always tried to be pragmatic,
which of course has pros and cons. During my career, I have always had
to reach some compromise to reach the objectives, and in the case of
FOSS development is to manage marketing in a peculiar way, so that the
focus is more on communications that on product marketing (if you look
at LibreOffice 7.0 release notes, you will realize that by no means we
can call them "release notes" according to a marketing definition, but
this is what we have and what we can rely on for the announcement, and
either we wait to have them perfect - something will never happen - or
we use what we have).

Hi Michael,

  Thanks for engaging here ! =) you write a friendly and helpful summary.

Simplifying and exaggerating a bit, I'd try to sum up the described
problem as "There's not enough revenue for ecosystem companies, but
those are essential for LibreOffice." and the described solution as
"Let's discourage enterprises/organizations from using LibreOffice from
TDF, and hope they'll use paid versions from ecosystem companies instead."

  Right; it -could- be seen as a simple "developers for users" trade off.
I'm not sure it is a trade-off though: I think we'll win more users by
having happy enterprise users and more investment in feature / function
and a richer product myself.

To sum it up, one of my main concerns is that organizations not using
"LibreOffice Personal" doesn't necessarily mean they'll use "LibreOffice
Enterprise". I see a rather high risk in the "LibreOffice Personal
approach" decreasing the overall LibreOffice use/market share, rather
causing organizations to switch to other office suites (or choose them
from the beginning), not just short-term. This probably wouldn't help to
reach the desired goal in the end, but rather have a negative effect on
both, TDF-provided LibreOffice as well as "LibreOffice Enterprise" and
the ecosystem that provides it.

  There is risk in any change, but also risks in stasis - particularly
when we know the status quo doesn't work well.

https://people.gnome.org/~michael/data/vendor-neutral-marketing.html

Thanks for all the information, that's really informative and helps to
better understand the motivation/background.

  My pleasure; it's eighteen months old, but of course almost nothing
changes in that time.

From what I have heard, there's also a tendency in (particularly in
large) organizations to only use products backed by some kind of SLA, so
there is some contractor to contact (or blame) in case of problems.

  I've met a few organizations like this - but they seem to be extremely
rare. Can they even get an SLA for Firefox or Chrome ?

  So - lets turn this around - can anyone thing of more than
five enterprises that paid for support or instead (just as good)
contributed meaningfully to LibreOffice instead ? Munich, and ...

At least those 3 quickly came to my mind

  Sure; there's a reason I picked five :wink:

Regarding paid support, I've at least heard from two or three
organizations, but don't know what amounts of money were/are involved
there; that's certainly something the involved ecosystem companies (so
basically you and Thorsten) know better...

  So - I was talking of new contributors; how many can we think of that
are new since 2018 ? =)

  => It is the norm to deploy LibreOffice from TDF in
     enterprises, and pay nothing for support &
     maintenance that can go into development.
    + its that good.

Might one (main) problem be that LibreOffice (from TDF as well as its
enterprise derivatives) just is not widely used by companies whose IT
strategy involves paying for their office suites (yet)?

  We're really quite widely used; our 200+m users includes many large
government and business deployments.

IMHO, it'd be ideal to try to get more organizations switch to
LibreOffice editions from whatever they're using now which I'd expect to
increase demand for professional support as well.

  I think this was one of the headings in my mail. With the current %age
up-take of professional support we run out of world population before we
get enough developers to make LibreOffice fly.

As written in my previous email [2], I agree that many larger
deployments involving "professional use" will probably want to use an
edition with some kind of professional support (e.g. due to Service
Level Agreements, long-term support, more stability, new features) and
the TDF-provided version won't fit their needs, regardless of whether it
has a "Personal" tag attached or not.
Therefore, also from the experiences that the City of Munich made, I
tend to expect that affected organizations will find this out

  Well - it took Munich a long time to find this out I think; furthermore
our marketing tends not to make people effectively aware of the
existence of, nevermind the benefits of, support / migration / training
- even in the abstract. It also tends to make people believe the
software is created by Volunteers + TDF at many points. I guess
enterprises think that TDF is sustained by donations from end-users, and
volunteers just train themselves & contribute - so ... no need to
support the ecosystem ? =)

  You may notice the other discussions here arguing for a replacement of
the explicit recommendation to get support & services from the download
page (which we know doesn't work) with a suggestion.

  => The LibreOffice brand is devalued and we have no way
     of telling people that the product they deployed was
     not suitable for deployment in an enterprise and has
     no effective support.

While those companies may not contribute meaningfully to LibreOffice
upstream, I tend to think that they will probably manage to do their own
branded build of LibreOffice ("MyOffice" or whatever, without a
"Personal" tag attached), and then offer that with the same
(nonexisting) support for basically the same price.

  Sure - but they will have to put their own brands on something and
associate the terrible reputation for support with their brand not the
LibreOffice project =)

  Possibly if we give TDF 10x more more money - it will become a
more dynamic organization (though still run by a committee of ten);
perhaps that is possible.

That sounds sad and like it would be great to have that improved, even
if it's only a partial solution.

  Sign up, join the board & make things happen. We need more smart polite
people in the board and/or the MC.

  Probably this nudge alone is enough to try to encourage real
contribution to LibreOffice, and get the numbers of users buying
support and thus contributing, or else contribuing themselves up from
~zero.

This might work, but as mentioned earlier, I see quite high risks it
might in the end make things even worse (and it's hard to guess, which
is true...).

  If there are large numbers of users who refuse to contribute anything
in enterprises - and they will switch away if we ask them to: it seems
to me we're unlikely to get much from them anyway.

  I try to think well of people, so I do think there are a large pool of
well-meaning people who like our brand, and product and who - if
effectively steered - and can provide a clear and plausible rational to
their management: "We can't deploy the Personal edition - we need to use
the Enterprise edition" - will seek out and support the project in this
way. Every LibreOffice deployment must have an enthusiast behind it: but
(apparently) none of them can effectively encourage anyone to pay; what
can we do to help them ? =)

In any case, as others have already said, I personally don't like the
idea of "actively discouraging" the use of TDF's LibreOffice, but it'd
be great to have an approach to more positively encourage the use of
enterprise editions.

  Differentiation is like that. Somewhere we have to have a page which
says: "Who should use what version" - and/or the enterprise people have
to have a way to say: use XYZ version for ABC reason. I hear lots of
good-ideas about adding proprietary features & value for ABC - but
they're not attractive to me. A simple marketing message would be great
that does this differentiation in one place outside of the software.

Ultimately, the goal should be to somehow convince organizations
currently using other office suites to migrate to LibreOffice
(Enterprise), and I think that the popularity of TDF's LibreOffice plays
a vital role there as well.

  Unless someone tells them that TDF's LibreOffice is not suitable for
their enterprise - their first (and final) stop is to deploy
GratisOffice I'm afraid, ~all the data points in that direction. They
see GratisOffice as more genuine, and legitimate and authentic than
Collabora Office eg. which is pretty depressing given how much we put in.

  Conflating your other mail:

  And of course for us Collabora Online is the tip of
the spear for investment & expected returns, with
education being a key sector currently. We have a
growing set of customers there.

  That as well as some intermittent consultancy
pieces lets us work on improving lots of things in
the LibreOffice core for our users.

Out of curiosity:
Does that mean that much of the work that Collabora does
for desktop is basically not being paid for by customers
directly, i.e. something that Collabora invests into by
itself?

  I mentioned New desktop customers since 2018. We have a big mix of
existing larger customers to whom we are grateful many of whom renew:
though getting 100% renewal is ~impossible, and growing that is hard.

  We have a set of faithful consulting customers though they are highly
intermittent: since we solve their problems well, they go away & we have
to acquire new customers.

  Then the other problem I have is a soft heart & over-enthusiastic
programmers. Customers tend to put these puppy-dog eyes on and say: "I
can't afford it, but surely you'll do it anyway at ~below cost; it's all
for the good of the project / product" - and I get suckered (again), and
then on top our staff do an extra specially good job that goes beyond
the minimum the customer asks for - and consume a ton of time doing that
- and in any circumstance estimating time for projects is a nightmare -
so when you look at the economics, it ends up loss-making. It is far
from trivial running a business.

  In another adjacent thread - people say our marketing sucks, and we
should invest a ton more in that - sure, but given finite resources - I
like to invest in LibreOffice development - only, we can't get any
return on the desktop - so its just madness.

Or is it more like the work is done in the context
of online, and desktop profits "implicitly" as well,
since many of the changes in core (like work being done
in the document model) directly affect both, desktop
and online?

  There is a chunk of this too; but not nearly enough perhaps that will
increase over time; it is/was the idea of having a shared code-base.

  It is of course, also worth noting that CIB does great stuff across the
codebase, so well worth asking Thorsten similar questions too.

  Thanks !

    Michael.

Hi

we have a peculiar development process which is IMHO rather difficult
to steer according to the usual marketing process.

To be honest: The part with "from which our product development" was a joke, knowing the facts as well. :wink:
(btw. the product is that mature it seems rather difficult to me to find useful new features which affect more than a dozen people - except UI improvements maybe)

But what's about "sound analysis of requirements of our market from which our market communication is coherently derived?"

Let's say we have three sources of knowing user requirements:

1.) Bugzilla end user requests for new features
2.) Askbot questions on features mostly existing but not known (which for the user asking makes no difference to 1)
3.) Anticipation of upcoming market developments (i.e. increasing WFH) and requirements which may come out of this

Getting these analyzed on more than a face-validity base may guide our communication to be more targeted on user requirements and therefore more interesting or compelling for them (i.e. how to set up a workflow with lots of off-premise users). Maybe even the ecosystem takes profit out of such an analysis - developing LOOL wasn't decided after the fifth beer in a bar, I presume.

And a user requirement must not necessarily be a function of code. Is there a requirement for single seat support contract? Mike says no, but maybe this is also a hen/egg situation?
Is there a need to have some expert talks on i.e. how to do product neutral call for bids? Which in return may get us some ecosystem partners?
Or maybe we need no more better hairnets but a hairspray kind of idea?

Meant just as examples.

Michael Meeks kirjoitti 13.7.2020 klo 21.32:

From what I have heard, there's also a tendency in (particularly in
large) organizations to only use products backed by some kind of SLA, so
there is some contractor to contact (or blame) in case of problems.

  I've met a few organizations like this - but they seem to be extremely
rare. Can they even get an SLA for Firefox or Chrome ?

They can for Firefox since last year, but only if they are in the U.S.: https://www.ghacks.net/2019/09/12/firefox-premium-for-enterprises-is-now-available/

"Firefox Premium Support is a new offer for Enterprises that provides organizations with improved support options. The plan provides access to an Enterprise customer portal, improved bug submission options and bug fixes, SLA management tools and more."

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/enterprise/#plans

It seems if you visit the enterprise URL outside U.S., you won't see the offer for Premium.

Ilmari

Hi Jonathon,

  I think Thorsten stated more cleanly as:

  "The market for desktop libreoffice is tough;
   sales cycles frequently count in multiple years"

I'd blame the lack of sales on Collabora having a really
bad website

  So, if getting sales is only a function of a really good website - I
would really suggest that you enter the market, make a fortune -and-
contribute that back to LibreOffice =) all are welcome in the ecosystem.

  Beyond that - creating, maintaining and translating a website into a
handful of languages is an expensive hobby.

  Another (fading) problem is that what most of us love to do is to write
FLOSS code that improves our customers' lives and to contribute it to
LibreOffice =)

  You're right - we probably should spend less on that, and more on
finding FLOSS-friendly people that like to produce polished marketing
copy (CV's to my inbox) - but perhaps you can forgive the imbalance.

Is that the online edition, or the desktop
edition? Is that Tier 1 or Tier 2 support?

  Worth digging out my mail on the counter-intuitive negatives of
answering all questions on your web-page =)

  ATB,

    Michael.

  I think Thorsten stated more cleanly as:

  "The market for desktop libreoffice is tough;
   sales cycles frequently count in multiple years"

I'd blame the lack of sales on Collabora having a really
bad website

  So, if getting sales is only a function of a really good website

I think it was Brian Tracy who wrote if your website can't sell the
qualified prospect, it needs to be redesigned.

For a previous generation, Joe Girard wrote that the presentation you
create, should have the suspect reaching for the pen to sign off on the
deal, before they had finished looking at it.

Websites provide a first impression, and if that impression is negative,
that is the end of the story. You never hear from those suspects.
Learning that the website automatically disqualified the firm, is
something that an organisation rarely directly hears from the former
suspect, and is even more rarely believed by the board. Third party
surveys consistently indicate that a bad website loses business. It
literally doesn't matter if the firm is B2B or B2C orientated.

Beyond that - creating, maintaining and translating a website into a handful of languages is an expensive hobby.

When you don't know if the pricing is US dollars or Canadian dollars,
you've got an issue. (Years ago, Howard Stern paid one of the
bubble-headed bleach blondes he specialises in interviewing, a billion
Zimbabwean dollars, for her appearance. She was so excited about
receiving so much money, she never stopped to convert it to US$. It was
just under US$100, which was well below the usual appearance fee.)

Budget US$100,000 per language per year, for a multilingual website.
This is addition to the cost of designing and maintaining the website.
Before adding languages, look at both the financial ROI, and PR value.
Will the language generate at least US$1,000,000 in additional business
each year? IOW, will adding a page in say, Flemish, generate
US$10,000,000 in additional revenue, over the next decade. Revenue that
the organisation would not have had, had the Flemish pages not existed?

Is that the online edition, or the desktop
edition? Is that Tier 1 or Tier 2 support?

Worth digging out my mail on the counter-intuitive negatives of answering all questions on your web-page

That gets into the "how much information is too much information"
debate. Enough information to qualify the suspect as a prospect,
discourage the tire-kicker, and not get struck off, because it appears
that the organisation can't solve the suspect's problem.

The last thing any business owner wants to hear from a current customer
is "I went with company x, because I didn't know you provided that service."

jonathon

Hi Michael,

thanks for your reply. :slight_smile:

Simplifying and exaggerating a bit, I'd try to sum up the described
problem as "There's not enough revenue for ecosystem companies, but
those are essential for LibreOffice." and the described solution as
"Let's discourage enterprises/organizations from using LibreOffice from
TDF, and hope they'll use paid versions from ecosystem companies instead."

  Right; it -could- be seen as a simple "developers for users" trade off.
I'm not sure it is a trade-off though: I think we'll win more users by
having happy enterprise users and more investment in feature / function
and a richer product myself.

I fully agree with the latter part, let's describe it as:

  more contributors => richer product => more users

My assumption is still that having more users will also result in more
contribution:

  more users => more contributors => richer product

The nice thing is that if you combine both of them, that results in:

  ... => more users => more contributors => richer product => more users
=> more contributors => richer product => ...

(which could probably be better depicted by some nice graph showing a
circle with continual growth, but I think the idea is clear...)

The interesting question then is how/where to start.
And my concern is that the "Personal Edition approach" will lead to
fewer users and I'm not so sure this will ever be compensated either in
the medium or the long run.

  There is risk in any change, but also risks in stasis - particularly
when we know the status quo doesn't work well.

The "Personal Edition approach" *might* work of course; it's not what
I'd personally expect, though.

From what I have heard, there's also a tendency in (particularly in
large) organizations to only use products backed by some kind of SLA, so
there is some contractor to contact (or blame) in case of problems.

  I've met a few organizations like this - but they seem to be extremely
rare. Can they even get an SLA for Firefox or Chrome ?

Ilmari has answered the explicit question regarding Firefox support
already. (I wouldn't have known myself.)

In any case, the wording "only use products backed by some kind of SLA"
probably was a bit too strong and there are other factors limiting what
software that applies to.

While browsers are certainly mission-critical these days, the facts that
they are available for free (i.e. gratis) and the existence of web
standards make it easier to have multiple browsers in parallel or switch
between them (at least these days, was certainly different in the past),
making that a somewhat less "critical" component in my eyes regarding
professional support.

In theory, document standards should allow switching between office
suites or using them in parallel as well, but that is known to be much
more difficult in practice, due to interoperability issues and
additional components on top, like macros or all kinds of third-party
software, so the office suite becomes some kind of "platform" that is
mission-critical and not easily replaceable.

I think organizations with such an approach (use software with SLA for
mission-critical tasks, in slight variations of where this applies) are
not too uncommon among larger organizations; maybe too few of them are
using LibreOffice for various reasons (never heard of it, never heard
there is professional support available, doesn't fit their needs,...).

I fully agree that it's unfortunate if migrations to LO (and FLOSS in
general) are/were done/encouraged only because it's "free as in free
beer", "no cost at all", which certainly isn't key to success for either
the enterprise nor the LibreOffice ecosystem.

  So - lets turn this around - can anyone thing of more than
five enterprises that paid for support or instead (just as good)
contributed meaningfully to LibreOffice instead ? Munich, and ...

At least those 3 quickly came to my mind

  Sure; there's a reason I picked five :wink:

Adding the two from the follow-up email, those that came to my mind
(without checking git log):

* NISZ
* SIL
* TU Dresden
* BaseAlt
* BSI (German "Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik")

And of course, there's RedHat, if all enterprises except those listed in
the "Ecosystem partners" section on the website [1] count... :wink:

Regarding paid support, I've at least heard from two or three
organizations, but don't know what amounts of money were/are involved
there; that's certainly something the involved ecosystem companies (so
basically you and Thorsten) know better...

  So - I was talking of new contributors; how many can we think of that
are new since 2018 ? =)

Regarding all contributions, NISZ falls into that category; but I don't
know details regarding paid support, those are presumably not publicly
available. :wink:

To be balanced, when talking only about new contributors, I think it'd
also be good to consider how many new (enterprise) users there actually
are since 2018. Do you know whether such numbers are easily available?

  => It is the norm to deploy LibreOffice from TDF in
     enterprises, and pay nothing for support &
     maintenance that can go into development.
    + its that good.

Might one (main) problem be that LibreOffice (from TDF as well as its
enterprise derivatives) just is not widely used by companies whose IT
strategy involves paying for their office suites (yet)?

  We're really quite widely used; our 200+m users includes many large
government and business deployments.

IMHO, it'd be ideal to try to get more organizations switch to
LibreOffice editions from whatever they're using now which I'd expect to
increase demand for professional support as well.

  I think this was one of the headings in my mail. With the current %age
up-take of professional support we run out of world population before we
get enough developers to make LibreOffice fly.

I tend to have a more optimistic view here, given what happened e.g. in
Munich and the contributors mentioned above.

I think one/the key point where we have different expectations is
whether we believe (enough) large enterprises and governments tend to
ask for professional support when using LibreOffice as mission-critical
software. - And we have obviously made different experiences there as
well, which may be one reason for this.

Besides the existing examples already relying on support and/or
contributing back to LibreOffice themselves, there are also those that
you mention as "bad examples" in your initial email:

  Another pathology is that there are companies who ship
LibreOffice, often claiming support, but then file all their tickets
up-stream and hope they are fixed for free. Naturally they are cheaper
in government tenders, they use our brand, they leave the customer
with hundreds of un-fixed bugs, and all of the users with a terrible
experience.

In those cases, a demand for support clearly exists (but is met in a
non-optimal way; I think Sophie's email [2] describes it well).

Maybe trying to steer that into another direction would be a huge step
forward?

In case the customers are actually making bad experiences, is it
possible they'll be more willing to pay more when they do the next tender?

While public tenders have a tendency to select the provider with the
lowest price, criteria like expertise in the area - proved e.g. by
having LibreOffice-certified staff - could possibly of help here.
So a key question here might be where those companies look for (and
easily find!) information how to do things better next time (or right
from the start)?

As written in my previous email [2], I agree that many larger
deployments involving "professional use" will probably want to use an
edition with some kind of professional support (e.g. due to Service
Level Agreements, long-term support, more stability, new features) and
the TDF-provided version won't fit their needs, regardless of whether it
has a "Personal" tag attached or not.
Therefore, also from the experiences that the City of Munich made, I
tend to expect that affected organizations will find this out

  Well - it took Munich a long time to find this out I think; furthermore
our marketing tends not to make people effectively aware of the
existence of, nevermind the benefits of, support / migration / training
- even in the abstract. It also tends to make people believe the
software is created by Volunteers + TDF at many points. I guess
enterprises think that TDF is sustained by donations from end-users, and
volunteers just train themselves & contribute - so ... no need to
support the ecosystem ? =)

The more I read and think about the topic, the more it seems to me that
this may be a/the key problem.

In general, I'd be fine about making it more obvious/prominent that
professional support via ecosystem companies is available, and it's
recommended to organizations to actually make use of it, and think this
is actually crucial to improve the situation.

The primary place where I'd expect such notes is on the LibreOffice website.
I just visited libreoffice.org, and the way where I'd look first is
under "Get Help" -> "Professional Support", which mentions this after
introducing the different kinds of certification:
"If you are interested in their services, the list below shows our
certified developers and professionals - with their affiliation - in
randomized order."

I wouldn't read any explicit recommendation into that, maybe that'd be a
good place to encourage/emphasize that further?

  You may notice the other discussions here arguing for a replacement of
the explicit recommendation to get support & services from the download
page (which we know doesn't work) with a suggestion.

As mentioned, I myself have no general objections against recommending
professional support and services at appropriate places and even
clarify/strengthen that where appropriate, thus "positively encouraging"
making use of those.

However, the "Personal Edition approach" with the suggested label is
rather discouraging the use of TDF LibreOffice, which I see as a
different approach, one I don't like.

While those companies may not contribute meaningfully to LibreOffice
upstream, I tend to think that they will probably manage to do their own
branded build of LibreOffice ("MyOffice" or whatever, without a
"Personal" tag attached), and then offer that with the same
(nonexisting) support for basically the same price.

  Sure - but they will have to put their own brands on something and
associate the terrible reputation for support with their brand not the
LibreOffice project =)

I'm wondering, however, whether that is actually perceived much
differently from what actual ecosystem companies provide. Both are "some
vendor-branded office suite based on LibreOffice", or is there some
additional obvious distinction for those who don't know more about the
background?

Related question: Would LibreOffice's current Trademark policy [1]
(currently or in adapted form) actually require to not use the name
"LibreOffice" when disabling the "Personal" branding, e.g. via autogen
option?

I'm wondering what Linux distros will do if so, e.g. I can hardly
imagine some enterprise Linux distro like RedHat's or SUSE's shipping
"LibreOffice Personal" - and don't think it would be helpful to have
something similar to what the Firefox/Iceweasel situation was like in
Debian.

  If there are large numbers of users who refuse to contribute anything
in enterprises - and they will switch away if we ask them to: it seems
to me we're unlikely to get much from them anyway.

I pretty much agree here with what Justin wrote in [3].

I even think it's fine if there are organizations using LibreOffice for
free if it actually fits their needs. As long as there are enough others
that contribute in some way, that should not be a problem, so I don't
see a need to "force" them to use something different instead.
(And I do not think that an unsupported LibreOffice fits the needs of
most, in particular large, organizations, so there should be "enough
need" for professional support.)

In the end, I think that in general, even "just" using LibreOffice is a
contribution by "spreading the word" and making the software known to
more people, as happens e.g. in universities that might otherwise fall
back to providing just other (proprietary?) software to their
students, who will later become the people to decide in enterprises, etc.
(That of course doesn't really apply where LibreOffice isn't suitable
and results in a horrible experience...)

At least among the (non-IT) people that I talk to, many initially have
no idea what I'm talking about when I mention LibreOffice, about half of
them know OpenOffice, though, and ~everybody knows MS Office.

  I try to think well of people, so I do think there are a large pool of
well-meaning people who like our brand, and product and who - if
effectively steered - and can provide a clear and plausible rational to
their management: "We can't deploy the Personal edition - we need to use
the Enterprise edition" - will seek out and support the project in this
way. Every LibreOffice deployment must have an enthusiast behind it: but
(apparently) none of them can effectively encourage anyone to pay; what
can we do to help them ? =)

This assumption/case (there are already people who want to contribute,
but their management doesn't want to) wasn't clear to me earlier.

In fact, my assumption of a wider use of LibreOffice leading to more
contributors mostly works where IT management does a good job without
having to be forced to do so. And I fully agree that the "We want to use
LibreOffice just because it doesn't cost anything" approach is generally
not helpful, but may even cause more harm then good.
(The same is true for FLOSS in general, not just LibreOffice, IMHO.)

In any case, as others have already said, I personally don't like the
idea of "actively discouraging" the use of TDF's LibreOffice, but it'd
be great to have an approach to more positively encourage the use of
enterprise editions.

  Differentiation is like that. Somewhere we have to have a page which
says: "Who should use what version" - and/or the enterprise people have
to have a way to say: use XYZ version for ABC reason. I hear lots of
good-ideas about adding proprietary features & value for ABC - but
they're not attractive to me. A simple marketing message would be great
that does this differentiation in one place outside of the software.

I fully agree.

Ultimately, the goal should be to somehow convince organizations
currently using other office suites to migrate to LibreOffice
(Enterprise), and I think that the popularity of TDF's LibreOffice plays
a vital role there as well.

  Unless someone tells them that TDF's LibreOffice is not suitable for
their enterprise - their first (and final) stop is to deploy
GratisOffice I'm afraid, ~all the data points in that direction. They
see GratisOffice as more genuine, and legitimate and authentic than
Collabora Office eg. which is pretty depressing given how much we put in.

Yep, the question is just what the best way to tell them is.

Regarding the main "target audience":
Is the assumption that (most of) those people who need to be told
actually don't know that there is and they might want professional
support or that they know, but still ignore it?

In the former case, adding the relevant information (professional
support available and encouraged for enterprises) more explicitly to the
website or maybe using existing mechanisms to inform the user (like
mentioning support in the donation/contribution infobars or add a "Tip
of the Day" with that info) might be a good way of dealing with this, in
my opinion.

For the latter case (they know, but don't want to), this wouldn't help,
of course, but I think there are legitimate use cases in that area as well.

One scenario e.g. is also if an organization uses TDF's LibreOffice, and
does code contributions or pays an ecosystem company to fix bugs or
develop new features, and is happy to get them with the next TDF (minor)
release.
While I understand that you prefer a license-based approach to this one,
this is still contribution we shouldn't discourage (but rather
encourage) in my opinion.
(I know of at least one university that went with this approach.)

  Then the other problem I have is a soft heart & over-enthusiastic
programmers. Customers tend to put these puppy-dog eyes on and say: "I
can't afford it, but surely you'll do it anyway at ~below cost; it's all
for the good of the project / product" - and I get suckered (again), and
then on top our staff do an extra specially good job that goes beyond
the minimum the customer asks for - and consume a ton of time doing that
- and in any circumstance estimating time for projects is a nightmare -
so when you look at the economics, it ends up loss-making. It is far
from trivial running a business.

I really appreciate and highly respect that way of not doing things just
for business sake but with a deep interest in LibreOffice itself. =)

But I see the difficulties and that actually sounds related/similar to
the topic being discussed here...

Obviously, it's much easier for me to make assumptions on how things
may/should work without actually running an ecosystem company, so thanks
for your engagement.

Best regards,
Michael

[1] https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/
[2]
https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/msg04720.html
[3]
https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/msg04681.html

The 'free beer' argument starting to become annoying;-). I'm hearing lots of self-pitty.
Nobody asks a company to contribute to the LibreOffice code (for free). Yes, it belongs to a model where you believe in.
If you believe code be open source, while making profit, it's also your task to come up with a business model generating revenue.
Not only with some vague outlines/sketches. Full blown business plan include marketing plan is needed.
Say you're going the bank. And say he, I want to lend some money, say € 1.000.000 but € 2.00.000 would also be nice.
I'm starting my own company selling support for LibreOffice. I'm professional engineer have a development team, and some experience in the business.

I assume you have to a lot more to get those 1.000.000 euro/pound/dollar. The will scrutinize your plan; being harsh unfair etc
The want a business case, business plan, marketing plan (for example targeted  audience).
A income prognosis etc. For what I have read here, there are only rudimentary sketches. I think it's possible, but it's not easy. Ubuntu isn't profit machine either.

Even in the luxury position you don't have to go to a bank, it's still needed! Except if you want to opt for lots and lots of costly experiences.

The world is hard and pretty unfair. Artists sold songs on CD with big labels.. Everything is on Youtube these day's. Revenue now is made by concerts etc.
Papers still trying to find a proposition. Paywall/ ad-financed (ad blockers)/ being free (guardian). Wikipedia still screaming/begging/nagging for money. 2% of all users world wide donate! 2%!!

The commercial company's have to handle piracy.. Else the product sold free, but still used freely.

Telesto

Hi Michael,

Michael Weghorn wrote:

In the former case, adding the relevant information (professional
support available and encouraged for enterprises) more explicitly to the
website or maybe using existing mechanisms to inform the user (like
mentioning support in the donation/contribution infobars or add a "Tip
of the Day" with that info) might be a good way of dealing with this, in
my opinion.

Yes - the important aspect here being, that many users in a corporate
deployment would never see the download page. So indeed a way to bring
those facts in front of users' eyes is important. The Personal (or
rather more likely, given the discussion here, Community) tag would
deliver that.

But clever ways to insert that into info bar or tips of the day would
be cool, too - it's just that a window title bar mention is visible
~all the time, whereas info bars are used sparingly.

I have no insight into the psychology here though, whether one or the
other approach would be more effective in nudging. Perhaps we can try
both? :wink:

Cheers,

-- Thorsten

Besides the ecosystem company (and sustainable LibreOffice development)
point of view, my comment above was also meant for the "direct" customer
view.

In my opinion (and from own experience at the City of Munich),
LibreOffice (and other FLOSS software) is often not suitable for many
large enterprises "as is", so a good way of managing the lifecycle and
getting issues addressed (i.e. professional support of some kind) is
required to make it work well and users happy.

The problem is that if management was persuaded it was a good idea to
introduce LibreOffice just because it's "free as in free beer", you
won't have (and will have a hard time getting) the resources to handle
issues appropriately, so it's better to avoid wrong expectations.

Michael

Hi Thorsten,

Michael Weghorn wrote:

In the former case, adding the relevant information (professional
support available and encouraged for enterprises) more explicitly to the
website or maybe using existing mechanisms to inform the user (like
mentioning support in the donation/contribution infobars or add a "Tip
of the Day" with that info) might be a good way of dealing with this, in
my opinion.

Yes - the important aspect here being, that many users in a corporate
deployment would never see the download page. So indeed a way to bring
those facts in front of users' eyes is important. The Personal (or
rather more likely, given the discussion here, Community) tag would
deliver that.

But clever ways to insert that into info bar or tips of the day would
be cool, too - it's just that a window title bar mention is visible
~all the time, whereas info bars are used sparingly.

I have no insight into the psychology here though, whether one or the
other approach would be more effective in nudging. Perhaps we can try
both? :wink:

In my opinion, the "Personal" tag is more nudging, which is actually why
I like the other approach better.

The upside (or downside, as you see it...) is that those who "know what
they're doing" and for whom LibreOffice as provided by TDF may be an
acceptable approach after all (s. some notes on potential scenarios in
the previous email), can still decide to use it without being "forced"
to use another product.

This is why I mentioned this mostly helps for the "former case" (i.e.
educate those people that actually don't know, not those who
deliberately decide not to buy a "Professional Edition").

Best regards,
Michael

Hi Michael,

Michael Weghorn wrote:

In my opinion (and from own experience at the City of Munich),
LibreOffice (and other FLOSS software) is often not suitable for many
large enterprises "as is", so a good way of managing the lifecycle and
getting issues addressed (i.e. professional support of some kind) is
required to make it work well and users happy.

Seconded. And it's one of the greatest advantages of FLOSS in the
enterprise - people can absolutely tailor it to their _specific_ needs
and requirements, by adding the features & fixes they need.

That's particularly appealing to larger-scale deployments (where
economies of scale offer good value-for-money on a per-user
price).

Would be great to market this better.

The problem is that if management was persuaded it was a good idea
to introduce LibreOffice just because it's "free as in free beer",
you won't have (and will have a hard time getting) the resources to
handle issues appropriately, so it's better to avoid wrong
expectations.

Quite. This situation is bad for the company, bad for the users, _and_
bad for us in the project. And it's sometimes ~impossible to change
minds after the fact. So for LibreOffice, past mistakes of
"overselling" to the enterprise (though I believe we inherited many of
those wrong expectations from OOo) are coming back to haunt us now.

Cheers,

-- Thorsten

Hi there,

  I thought I'd pull together a thread that runs through a
subset of the comments here:

Here is Mark S writing in bugzilla:

Let LibreOffice stay LibreOffice, and let any commercial derivatives
deal with naming issues of their products on their own time.

  Several other comments are more of the form:

    "your problem, not mine", or
    "TDF doesn't need to nurture an ecosystem -
     why complain to TDF" ?

  So - of course, that is on one hand fine. Hypothetically TDF
could sit at the center of a pure volunteer project, perhaps with
enough mentors and enough donations that might work out (though on
current trends this might also result in a project a tenth of the
size). On the other hand getting there from here, while not loosing all
momentum would be wrenchingly problematic.

  I guess there are some elaboraions of this:

The 'free beer' argument starting to become annoying;-). I'm hearing
lots of self-pitty.
Nobody asks a company to contribute to the LibreOffice code (for free).
Yes, it belongs to a model where you believe in.
If you believe code be open source, while making profit, it's also your
task to come up with a business model generating revenue.

  Sure, so - it's a harsh market. TDF can choose to make it
harsher by competing with the ecosystem that creates much of the
LibreOffice code, and mentors much of the developer community. Or it
can be passive and do nothing to nurture investment. Or it can create
space for those that contribute to its mission and help out. Having a
clear approach is helpful though. One of the problems is ambiguity:
bait & switch: encourage the investment, but squash the returns by
changing the rules =) That is why having a long-term settled consensus
is really helpful.

The world is hard and pretty unfair.

  Indeed, on the other hand - my hope is that we shouldn't use
that as an argument to structure things to be deliberately unfair. To
a large degree TDF helps to seed the environment for the ecosystem to
flourish around the codebase and fulfill its mission with it. Arguably
(and I would say this) TDF cannot fill every niche, and serve every
market itself - for a host of reasons.

I'd blame the lack of sales on Collabora having a really bad website

  So, if getting sales is only a function of a really good website

I think it was Brian Tracy who wrote if your website can't sell the
qualified prospect, it needs to be redesigned.

   I think we're all hopeful that we can create an advert or
webpage that makes it impossible not to buy your product :wink: Brian's
quote mentions qualified prospects - that's much easier with a
sensible lead flow of people who are aware that you exist.

Beyond that - creating, maintaining and translating a website into
a handful of languages is an expensive hobby.

Budget US$100,000 per language per year, for a multilingual website.
This is addition to the cost of designing and maintaining the website.
Before adding languages, look at both the financial ROI, and PR value.
Will the language generate at least US$1,000,000 in additional business
each year ?

  Well, for our existing ~five languages - if we did that we'd
have to transition half of our development staff to marketing at some
significant loss to Free software; I assume you'll want a big budget
for paid multi-language advertising to bring people to that website,
and for sales people too to qualify the leads ? That would consume our
entire budget without any contribution back.

  Either way - given that the same website sells Online but not
Desktop, despite advertising both, my suggestion would be that making
people aware that they shouldn't be running large un-supported
deployments - is a leading factor here.

The last thing any business owner wants to hear from a current
customer is "I went with company x, because I didn't know you
provided that service."

  I think that's the fundamental problem here; getting the word
out effectively that the services around LibreOffice exist, and that
buying them is good for the customer, good for the codebase, so good
for all our users, and good for the community.

  ATB,

    Michael.

Hi there,

  This is a detailed mail, so it shows up as a TLDR; then a
status quo / resolution / benefits triplet, and a link to our FAQ.
We're excited about this as a way to decisively unwind a number of
inter-related problems at TDF. We'll keep an up-to-date version of
this in the FAQ.

* TLDR;

  Collabora announces that it will move its work on Online from
TDF to GitHub https://collaboraonline.github.io/, in order to ensure
future investment in the software development of Collabora Online and
LibreOffice. This will allow us to deliver on many of the requests
from the community and we expect that this will resolve the lengthy
discussions in the TDF Board around a fair strategy for "LibreOffice
online", thus freeing energy for other constructive topics.

* status quo / resolution / benefits:

** status quo: background & issues

  + the current status of "Online" at TDF is dis-satisfying to
  end-users, some community members, Collabora, and it creates
  strain in the LibreOffice project.

  + Online has been substantially created, sustained and
  continues to be developed by Collabora investment:

    + Collabora's 20+ committers provided 95%+ of the
      commits in the last year

  + LibreOffice Online has been a source-only project: a place
  to collaborate around development, with own-branded products
  versions derived from that. Publicly available products have
  encouraged people to buy support when under heavy use.

  + some TDF community, board and staff members have made it
  clear they don't accept this compromise, and want TDF to use
  the LibreOffice brand to distribute a competing gratis product
  in the marketplace driving the price to zero, (perhaps combined
  with nags for donations to TDF). Others wish to ship gratis
  LibreOffice branded builds not immediately but in 3-6 months.

  + still others dislike the idea of telling users that it is
  essential that they contribute to the project, in proportion
  to their ability. Others have concerns about even gentle moral
  suasion here eg. around tags & naming; others around donation
  requests. Still others recommend proprietary software, or sale
  of extensions as a solution. Some claim the TDF statues
  require one course of action, others that they do not.

  + this combination of uncertain direction, structure and
  statutes at TDF make it difficult for an investor today to
  have any confidence in a future return over the years in
  which that takes when the Online project is hosted by TDF.

  + TDF has historically avoided explaining clearly how
  LibreOffice is created even to its own community. It does not
  give effective credit to the commercial community members
  doing most of the indispensable work in any way
  that can drive a proportionate return. There is little
  confidence in this improving.

  + The prospect of the Collabora brand having to compete
  against something we ~95% build ourselves. ie. with products
  sold or distributed gratis under the popular "LibreOffice"
  brand - while Collabora continues to sustain, maintain, and
  improve the software in an effectively invisible way is deeply
  problematic.

    + imagine trying to explain to larger users why they
    should not use LibreOffice Online, but pay for
    Collabora Online. Absent significant help from TDF
    that is incredibly hard to do in a way that doesn't
    damage LibreOffice as a whole.

    + For TDF to provide significant support fairly, in a
    way that rewards investment, is incredibly challenging
    to achieve inside TDF's structures.

  + There are lots of good people on all sides of this argument
  who come from different perspectives. Many of them are
  unhappy; we seem stuck in a worst of all worlds position
  currently.

  + There is an ironic tension here between wanting everything
  to be gratis, and wanting investment. Ultimately by making
  everything gratis, while not encouraging users to contribute
  financially, and having no credible plan to reward investment
  - TDF harms its own FOSS mission, which aligns well with
  Collabora's: to produce great FLOSS software for everyone.

* TLDR; resolution: a move.

  + To sustain Online and to improve it requires substantial and
  ongoing investment and focus, far beyond what TDF can provide
  via nags & donations. Any returns require a stable
  environment.

  + We believe the most elegant way to resolve the strain and
  uncertainty is to move our existing sub-project & work around
  Online to a new project at Collabora.

    + this accounts for ~1.5% of the size of LibreOffice
      core (openhub) and around 1% of the translation
      strings.

  + This project would have continuity of license and FLOSS
    ethos. However it will be hosted outside TDF's
    infrastructure and regulation, hopefully as a friendly
    daughter project, using its own infrastructure. It would
    end up looking much like Fedora, openSUSE, Nextcloud,
    ownCloud, Seafile and many others.

  + Clearly TDF committership would transfer to Collabora Online,
    and we would welcome and honor all who wish to to contribute.

* TLDR; benefits:

  We expect that *iff* this move can be resolved in a
constructive and positive fashion, with a single clear destination
project then we would get these benefits:

  + Collabora will remove the reminder to users to get support
  for larger deployments (that annoy some) from CODE as part
  of this move.

  + By having a single Online project hosted by Collabora, a
  clear brand story easily establishes an appropriate credit for
  the origin of the product into every reference to it by those
  using it for free. Just like the other prominent OSS projects
  we integrate with.

  + This would remove the urgency around some elements of the new
  TDF marketing plans, Personal / Community etc. tags, external
  entities to offer downloads, difficult algorithms to work out
  whom TDF gives priority to in a (hoped for) LibreOffice
  Enterprise ecosystem, challenging trademark agreements etc.

  + The 'LibreOffice' brand would have a clearer scope: as both
  a Desktop product, and a core Technology which can be built
  upon to create amazing things such as Collabora Online.

  + There would be less aggravation in the board and community,
  and hopefully a return to positive mutual regard.

  + It would give confidence to Online investors that they
  control their destiny; with no-one else to blame.

  + This would allow investment to be sustained to fix bugs, and
  to create new FLOSS, meeting TDF's mission. This will continue
  to have a positive knock-on impact on improving the
  LibreOffice core: filters, rendering, performance, bug-fixes
  etc.

  + This is an opportunity for TDF to focus its positive energy
  on its important mission.

  + This will allow Collabora to experiment with GitHub to see
  if it reduces the barrier to contribution, and increases the
  pool of available contributors.

  + Collabora hopes the move will aid in maintaining income to
  continue investing in LibreOffice: mentoring, contributing
  code, sponsoring the conference, funding via the Advisory
  Board, mentoring at hack-fests, helping at the ESC, serving
  on the board etc.

  + This would also re-balance contribution to LibreOffice core,
  making volunteers the largest committers once again, followed
  by Collabora, RedHat, CIB, NISZ, TDF etc.

* TLDR; Conclusion

  This is primarily a change of presentation, that can un-pick a
big knot of badness in the LibreOffice community. It is primarily
driven by the need for continued investment in Online, in addition to
the huge effort that Collabora and our partners have put into the
product to date.

  In our view it is the best solution for both LibreOffice and
Collabora. If the move is handled sensibly we can look forward to a
bright and co-operative future. We start work on that move today; and
encourage people to checkout: https://collaboraonline.github.io/ And
to get involved.

  Of course, we would love to see TDF coming up with the right
mix of structure, entities, stability, branding, appreciation of
corporate contributions and so on to build confidence that another
approach is possible. There is time before our next LibreOffice
release in January for the community to ponder what to do with LOOL,
and to do their own thing, or support this move to capture the
benefits outlined above.

Clearly Collabora participants would want to abstain on any board vote
to ship competing Online products, but do expect to be included in the
discussion around that.

* More questions ?

  There is an FAQ on-line here:

  https://CollaboraOnline.github.io/post/faq/

* Footnote: LibreOffice rocks

In case people got confused, it is worth saying that LibreOffice is an
outstanding piece of software, produced as part of a wonderful, wide
community by some of the best developers, translators, documentors,
etc. you're likely to ever meet. We see LibreOffice as having as
a bright future in two ways:

  + as a great, rich desktop & laptop product (as now)

  + as a core LibreOffice technology - provided via LibreOfficeKit
  and UNO APIs - as a re-usable piece of Office awesomeness that can
  be built on by other projects and companies like Collabora,
  CIB, and many others to build new & valuable products.

We commend it to you, if you’ve not tried before why not:

https://www.libreoffice.org/community/get-involved/

Of course, Collabora continues to be committed to supporting and
improving our whole product mix, including LibreOffice derived bits,
and contributing back our and our customer's work to the LibreOffice
core.

Dear Michael,

thanks for the move to Colabora Online.

It’s very hard to guarantee sustainable development for the Collabora
employees and as General Manager of Collabora Productivity it’s your
job to take care of the staff. I wish you all the best, cause only if the
LibO dev’s has a bright future, the project will have it too.

In addition I don’t think that much will change between
LibreOffice and Collabora, cause as long as Collabora will find
funding work will be done for LibO.

As Collabora Online will be OSS I hope you make it as easy
as possible for contributors. At the end, the situation can

only improve, cause in the past LOOL was developed

mostly by Collabora and no community outside could be built.
Coming closer to Nextcloud (github) can also improve the situation.

As a LibreOffice contributor I’m happy to close the

private use discussion. But I hope that TDF will find some

sustainable ideas and concepts, cause the private use discussion
show very well, what didn’t work. Free use for everybody and
nobody (private, governments, companies) has to pay dev’s.

Best wishes
Andreas_K