Update on marketing and communication plans for the LibreOffice 7.x series

From the Board of Directors at The Document Foundation, the non-profit
entity behind LibreOffice:

Dear fellow Community members,

Time has now come to decide how to proceed with some of the proposed
changes taken from the Marketing/Communication Plan for 2020-2025 with
the regards of the 7.0 release, due in some weeks.

We really appreciated ideas and thoughts coming from our Community and
we want to thank everyone who actively participated in the discussion,
providing different points of views and sharing different scenarios, and
proving themselves as passionate and caring members of the Community.
Many contributions found on the board-discuss mailing list and/or via
other channels are thoughtful, interesting and worthy of a much more
profound discussion, in the common effort to overcome the challenge we
have at hand: providing even better sustainability to the Project and
its Community.

All those ideas, objections and insights will require more time to
digest, merge and distill than the short time that separates us from the
7.0 release, the major release for the 10th anniversary of our beloved
project, LibreOffice.

As such, the Board of Directors decided that the Marketing/Communication
Plan for 2020-2025 has to undergo further investigations and
refinements, that we hope to carry on with the support of Community
members, with the goal of implementing in a future release some clear,
discussed and agreed changes on branding and Marketing that will help
improving the sustainability of the project without lessening or
hindering the role of LibreOffice and its Community inside the free
software panorama.

Because of the importance of the topic at hand and the need of a worthy
and compelling discussion with the Community, we will provide a time
plan in a few days as well as some guidelines, with the goal of
streamlining the process and coming to some good conclusions in a quick
and effective way.

As such, the 7.0 release of LibreOffice will not see any of the
tagline/flavor text proposed inside the release candidate (RC) versions,
the Marketing/Communication Plan for 2020-2025 or any of the
alternatives proposed during the discussion, specifically inside the
splash-screen, the start center and the about box; to explain it with
other words, the modifications put in the RC versions with the regards
of branding will be reverted to a previous state, so there will be
seamless continuity from the 6.4 version to the 7.0.

As stated before, none of the changes being evaluated will affect the
license, the availability, the permitted uses and/or the functionality.
LibreOffice will always be free software and nothing is changing for end
users, developers and Community members.

Yet again, we renew our encouragement to contribute actively in the
discussion about the Marketing/Communication Plan for 2020-2025 in the
next weeks, to allow for a more effective branding/Marketing ideas for
the LibreOffice product and sustainability of its Community.

LibreOffice is celebrating its tenth birthday this year. We wouldn’t be
where we are today without you, our worldwide amazing Community and all
of its members, no matter their profession or background. Thank you
truly, to all of you, for the passion, energy and creativity you put
into this joint and thriving project. We're looking forward to the next
ten years to come!