Counterproposal to the "actization" of LibreOffice Online

Hi Cor,

I'm sorry to say it in public but I'm honestly appalled by your comment which shows your insensitivity to the matter that is being discussed and is providing an example of how disinformation works.

Maybe you missed the point here.

Some of us actually worked hard to prepare the ground to help others
trying to act in a fair and balanced way but after months of work and
negotiations someone decided that solidarity wasn't a priority.

Another perspective on that: "You rushed into the board with proposals
that would allow non-contributors to start competing with one of the
major contributors, by making use of the LibreOffice brand."
And .. then you were surprised that it wasn't welcomed with applause :slight_smile:

Cor

I would suggest you to read the directors emails and RedMine tickets about LOOL since March 2020 to discover that the most ethical and professional thing you could do is to apologise to the members of the community for your unfortunate comment.

Ciao

Paolo

Hi Marco!

On Tue, Jan 18, 2022 at 9:06 AM Marco Marinello <lists@marcomarinello.it> wrote:

Hi Simon,

Il 17/01/22 18:15, Simon Phipps ha scritto:

I especially liked something in your first idea:

TDF should publicly endorse
this choice, stating that the project is now hosted on Github and the
development is managed by a company of the ecosystem but is – at the end
of the day – always LibreOffice Online

I think this is the seed of a great approach which we could pursue in the context of the ingredient brand we have been evolving. It would need to be designed to apply to any relevant project, not just LOOL. We are more likely to see TDF’s mission advanced by encouraging and supporting fellow community members who try to innovate than by discussing what others should do and then looking for those others!

beware that the four bullet points I mentioned in the first email are not intended to be split.

Thanks for the comment - I do understand, it is irritating when people cherry-pick a larger comment. Neverless, it’s for a reason here. The other three bullets were specifically about LibreOffice Online and I agree with Thorsten and others that it’s best to separate the attic-isation process from the specific use case, so I have focussed on your first bullet which I believe could form the basis for a general case.

Cheers!

Simon

Hi Marco,

Marco Marinello wrote:

No. I started a new thread, as requested, not to be confused with *your*
thread regarding the actization proposal.

Indeed, sorry for the imprecise wording. Counter-proposal discussion
here. :wink:

Cheers,

-- Thorsten

Hi all,

On 18/01/2022 11:33, Simon Phipps wrote:

Hi Marco!

On Tue, Jan 18, 2022 at 9:06 AM Marco Marinello <lists@marcomarinello.it> wrote:

Hi Simon,

Il 17/01/22 18:15, Simon Phipps ha scritto:

I especially liked something in your first idea:

TDF should publicly endorse
this choice, stating that the project is now hosted on Github and the
development is managed by a company of the ecosystem but is – at the end
of the day – always LibreOffice Online

I think this is the seed of a great approach which we could pursue in the context of the ingredient brand we have been evolving. It would need to be designed to apply to any relevant project, not just LOOL. We are more likely to see TDF’s mission advanced by encouraging and supporting fellow community members who try to innovate than by discussing what others should do and then looking for those others!

beware that the four bullet points I mentioned in the first email are not intended to be split.

Thanks for the comment - I do understand, it is irritating when people cherry-pick a larger comment. Neverless, it’s for a reason here. The other three bullets were specifically about LibreOffice Online and I agree with Thorsten and others that it’s best to separate the attic-isation process from the specific use case, so I have focussed on your first bullet which I believe could form the basis for a general case.

I would say that the 4 bullet points are linked to the atticisation discussion as are related to the standard process of de-atticisation and for new projects led by commercial contributors.

As in this case, members of the community are wondering what they are getting back from the investment that they and TDF made on LOOL and at present we are unable to offer answers as we didn’t clarify the process and the rules in advance.

Is there any other suggestions on how to deliver LOOL to our members of the community?

Ciao

Paolo


Paolo Vecchi - Deputy Member of the Board of Directors
The Document Foundation, Kurfürstendamm 188, 10707 Berlin, DE
Gemeinnützige rechtsfähige Stiftung des bürgerlichen Rechts
Legal details: https://www.documentfoundation.org/imprint

Hi,

Personally, I'm not interested in playing zero-sum games (taking
development away from the ecosystem, and re-patriating it into
TDF). Instead, we need to work much more on creating win-win setups,
and supplementing each other.

TDF must make its choices as corporate contributors have to make theirs.

Fortunately corporate contributors have business models that allows them to grow without counting on TDF tenders so, while tenders will be still made to deal with complex development that other contributors are unable to tackle, we need to become capable of managing some of the project so that we are not always dependent on third parties that may not find a specific project fun or commercially interesting.

That sounds like a good approach to me.

There's definitely things that TDF can do much better than any
ecosystem company. There's also definitely things that ecosystem
companies are likely better suited for, than TDF. The same is true for
our volunteer community

True and that's why there is room for all to have fun and participate to make LibreOffice and related project great.

+1

One obvious area where there's very little commercial incentive to do
things is a11y. At the same time, that would be something very
charitable to fund & further! If there's budget for funding internal
development, a11y would be very high on my list of topics to focus on.

That's something that has been on the list to do for a long time.
I haven't noticed anything related to it in the ESC ranking or maybe it's simply not marked clearly enough.

If it isn't there then we should ask the ESC to propose fixes in that regards?

I think one point here is that doing a proper proposal for a tender requires having a rough understanding of the subject to be tendered, be able to define a reasonable scope and also give a rough estimation of how much work that will be. In other words, it either requires somebody who already has an overview and a good idea what to suggest, or somebody investing time to come up with something.

Regarding a11y, as somebody who started looking into that topic, but without a clear idea on anything more specific for tendering, I had created this suggestion for tendering some (still to be selected) bugs from the a11y meta bug in Bugzilla: [1]

I must admit that I wasn't too disappointed that the suggestion didn't make it into the top list in the ESC voting. Given that more time would have been required to further analyze bugs in question and select a reasonable subset for the tendering, I am not sure whether the overhead (on all involved sides) would much outweigh the effort, or whether it makes more sense for me to spend time in trying to improve a11y myself.

I think tendering works best for items where the scope is clear beforehand, while here it would be much easier to say:
"Here is a ranked list of a11y issues, spend X days on fixing as many as you can.", which to my knowledge doesn't really fit the tender model particularly well.

Maybe others have better ideas on potential a11y topics to tender or there are better ways to handle this, that's just the story behind the above-mentioned proposal... (which is the one clearly related to a11y in the list of proposals that ESC was voting on, [2]).

Best regards,
Michael

[1] https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Budget2022#Fix_accessibility_issues
[2] https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Budget2022

Hi Michael,

thanks for your email, your support and contributions.

Your comments regarding the complexity of proposing "tender ready" specifications vs just doing it is pretty much in line with my experience as sometimes it's easier/faster for me to do things than explaining what to do to someone that is not already in the loop.

With A11y could and should be different as it's something on which we should actively deal with but at present we may not have the necessary resources to review all the proposals so some may surface on the ESC ranking list while others may not.

The proposal I made to employ developers should help also in having the internal competences necessary to interact with specialists like you which can tell us "I'm happy to deal with those specific A11y related bugs but I don't have enough time to deal with these others, could you help?" and then a decision can be made to help fixing those bugs directly or help with the drafting of the technical specifications required for eventual tenders.

That would not mean that anyone could ask to help them fixing their bugs, or we'll run out of resources quite fast, but specific general interest areas like a11y should be given a priority as it's one of those areas where we can make a real difference for people.

It could take a while to get new developers on-board but in the meantime do tell us when you are able to refine the proposal as it may then be picked up by ESC or a member of staff for further evaluation.

Ciao

Paolo

Hi Paolo,

It could take a while to get new developers on-board but in the meantime do tell us when you are able to refine the proposal as it may then be picked up by ESC or a member of staff for further evaluation.

thanks! My personal plan is to continue looking into a11y as I find time and I'm of good hope this will give me enough insights to come up with a refined proposal to be considered in the ESC voting for next year's tenders.

Michael

Hi Michael!

On Wed, Jan 19, 2022 at 10:34 AM Michael Weghorn <m.weghorn@posteo.de> wrote:

I think tendering works best for items where the scope is clear
beforehand, while here it would be much easier to say:
“Here is a ranked list of a11y issues, spend X days on fixing as many as
you can.”, which to my knowledge doesn’t really fit the tender model
particularly well.

Maybe others have better ideas on potential a11y topics to tender or
there are better ways to handle this, that’s just the story behind the
above-mentioned proposal… (which is the one clearly related to a11y in
the list of proposals that ESC was voting on, [2]).

You are right that TDF’s current tendering approach is designed for well-understood tasks that the ESC members know is needed but do not want to do. I too was always disappointed how few of the accessibility tasks on the list fell into that category while I was on the Board. It seemed that things needed sufficient specialist experience that writing a satisfactory tender was sometimes the first task that needed doing!

Thus (and as you imply) the best approach might be for TDF to have an accessibility specialist define the work and then execute on it, instead of having the ESC do so directly. While this doesn’t fit today’s tendering process well, maybe we need to retain an accessibility expert, give them a budget and have them specify tasks (with ESC agreement) and then either perform them, lead a team performing them or select a contractor to perform them.

Cheers,

Simon

And also:

  https://collaboraonline.github.io/post/faq/#mobile-story

  which has links to the reports, with the (core) commits. And:

  https://collaboraonline.github.io/post/faq/#creators

  may be interesting too; all of that a year+ old.

  ATB,

    Michael.

And also:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160320072620/https://www.collaboraoffice.com/community-news/libreoffice-online-questions-answered-what-who-how-and-when/

Maybe also that gave some people the impression that LibreOffice OnLine, being hosted at TDF and "contributed to the LibreOffice project", would have been made available to all but that may just be my reading.

Ciao

Paolo

Hi,

the linked documents shows the different behavior / narrative during a
period without a commercial product and with the opposite.
During the first one it is a community project and it is one of the core
projects. It is welcomed that every community member (everyone)
contributes to the project, support it and use it for free (as product
of the community). It is also proposed that it will be supported as a
community project and get updates (etc.).
Once the project gets commercial ready this commitment was retracted.
And the speech changed to the statement that the project had only little
/ negligible contributions from the community.
If you analyze this statement you could get to the conclusion that the
contributions of one group of developers are not contributions to the
community. But if that would be the case, why could they apply for TDF
membership and so on?

And the statement, that Paolo linked in this thread, was made from TDF
in 2015 and you could find out who was on the board at that time:
https://www.documentfoundation.org/governance/board/2014-2016/

Thus it seemed very important to have clear rules for projects, that TDF
hosts and which were substantial driven by a professional entity.

And it's also obvious that a CoI could happen very likely, if one try to
wear two hats (on different sides of the table).

Regards,
Andreas

Hi Andreas,

I agree the narrative on Collabora's own site seems to clash a bit with what happened down the line.

I see that you were in the board at the time, as some of the current board members, so I guess you were as excited as others know that LOOL was going to be available for free to all. Maybe at the times there was no fear that it would have been taken away from us so nobody thought to make things clear with an official agreement which confirmed what Collabora had on its website.

One may hope that someone re-reads what it was suppose to happen and reviews some decisions.

In the meantime it is evident that we need to set some rules for the projects that TDF hosts so that we can have more clarity in future.

Ciao

Paolo

Hi Andreas, hi Paolo,

this thread has been going on for some time, and the subject is still
"Counterproposal to the 'actization' of LibreOffice Online"

I don't find any new input for that discussion. All points have been
made already, most of them repeatedly.

The irony of someone on the board at the time complaining that the
board at the time made a mistake is not lost on me.

So can we now finally turn this into something constructive?

That would be, among other things:

- concrete proposals what TDF should (or should not) do for future
  projects
- fundamentally new or different ideas on how to deal with stale
  projects

Everything else is badly off-topic on this thread (and very likely
even on this list). For general discussions, please do move that over
to our discuss@documentfoundation.org list.

Cheers, Thorsten

Hi Thorsten,

this is the thread that Marco Marinello created to see if anybody can come up with other proposals that may bring back LOOL instead of just having to forget about it.

While sadly it seems like the original main contributors to LOOL don't seem to add much in terms of proposals, at least it's useful to have a clearer view and understanding of the past to try avoiding something similar happening in future.

I do understand the position of all the members of the board at the time and also yours, Thorsten, as I believe that at the beginning the intentions were those expressed on the page I linked. Surely no one thought that a friend and a member of the same community would have acted that way.

That's understandable and nobody here is blaming anyone for choices made at that time.

The more recent past shows us that now we have to look at things more carefully and think about the future of the projects we host.

In regard to your questions:

- concrete proposals what TDF should (or should not) do for future
  projects

In your "atticisation" thread I clearly stated what I think we should do for projects that could be taken out of the attic AND for current/new projects we host.

- fundamentally new or different ideas on how to deal with stale
  projects

As I stated in your "atticisation" thread we definitely need to check the projects that we are hosting and see what requires to be formally welcomed with an agreement as the main contributor is a commercial organisations, which projects are obsolete and which projects can be revived.

I'll follow up on the board list also with the proposal to look more in detail at what we host and status and future of the Android Viewer.

Ciao

Paolo

Hi Paolo,

Paolo Vecchi wrote:

In regard to your questions:

[references to earlier emails]

I'll follow up on the board list also with the proposal to look more
in detail at what we host and status and future of the Android
Viewer.

Thanks. So let's end-thread here.

Cheers,

-- Thorsten

Hi Thorsten, all,

it's of course legit to ask people contributing here to comply with the
ML netiquette but I don't think closing the thread here is the solution.

In my opening message sent on January 9th I made a proposal consisting
of four points as an alternative approach to the current online
situation and although the ML is named "board-discuss", nobody from the
board commented on the merit of the proposal.

I'm geniunally interested in the opinion of who's currently driving the
foundation and I don't understand why you, Thorsten, as current and
future board member, are certainly following the thread but only asking
to close it, instead of giving your contribution. So please, as for
other board members, go back to my first mail here and reply to that.

ATB

Marco

Hi Marco,

I have to agree with you here that maybe censoring threads isn't the best way forward and that surely isn't a message agreed within the board.

While there haven't been yet clear answers that can bring a solution, at least we all have a clearer view on how LOOL came to be, evolved into a viable product and then has been forked.

As a deputy member of the board and a member of our community I expressed my opinion about your 4 points:

https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/2022/msg00057.html

It's true that I may have been a bit harsh with my answers, and I apologise if you got upset by it, but while I understand your proposal we have also to deal with the reality that without a reconsideration from the company that made the fork we don't have yet the internal/external contributors that could allow us to revive the LOOL project.

Even if I get full support from the board to employ internal developers I don't think is a good idea to unilaterally decide to backport the forked repository to LOOL without a clear agreement with the company involved so that probably won't fix the issue either.

Surely the fastest and easier way to solve the issue would be to have the company that forked LOOL to concede that they may have overlooked the initial agreement with TDF and the community but up to now we received no new proposals from them.

Having said that and with my answers underlying the issues I've noticed do you see ways to reformulate your proposal?

Any other practical proposals from other members of the board and the community?

Ciao

Paolo

Hi Marco,

it's unclear if we're talking past each other -

Marco Marinello wrote:

it's of course legit to ask people contributing here to comply with the
ML netiquette but I don't think closing the thread here is the solution.

This part of the thread is a conversation about the past, and as such
has served its purpose.

In my opening message sent on January 9th I made a proposal consisting
of four points as an alternative approach to the current online
situation and although the ML is named "board-discuss", nobody from the
board commented on the merit of the proposal.

There were board people answering, I counted two immediate follow-ups:

   Paolo: msg-id a2501c6d-5ed1-49bb-ebef-1e5a56cb65b0@documentfoundation.org
   Michael: msg-id b44f7c5d-968d-0904-703a-e0a03b18fb01@collabora.com

Plus a handful of good thoughts from community members, in the rather
massive side-thread that evolved from there.

I'm geniunally interested in the opinion of who's currently driving the
foundation and I don't understand why you, Thorsten, as current and
future board member, are certainly following the thread but only asking
to close it, instead of giving your contribution. So please, as for
other board members, go back to my first mail here and reply to that.

Not directly answering on a controversial proposal, that is triggering
quite emotional reactions, and has resulted in one of the longer
navel-gazing & history re-telling threads of the recent past - is
sometimes what is needed to not fuel the flames. I also had nothing
substantial to add, beyond the two existing answers.

I understand you frustrations & your motives, but I mostly agree with
Paolo: claiming Collabora Online is still TDF's, and then distributing
free binaries of it (which was the trigger for Collabora to leave in
the first place) - is quite a hostile move. It would also be beyond
tricky for TDF to message that to the general (FLOSS-affine) public.

There are aspects of your proposal that are really good ideas though,
c.f. the comments Simon made. The evolving consensus in the board it
seems (though of course I cannot speak for them), is that TDF should
for the moment close the chapter of LibreOffice Online.

All the best,

-- Thorsten

Hi all,

I believe a few comments require notes and corrections as they may mislead the community:

Not directly answering on a controversial proposal,

Members of the community are actually asking for answers and members of the board should help in providing them regardless of the level of controversy.

I understand you frustrations & your motives, but I mostly agree with
Paolo: claiming Collabora Online is still TDF's,

The statement is not correct.
I claimed that LibreOffice OnLine is still TDF's even if it seems we haven't yet found a way to move it forward, Collabora Online is a third party product.

  and then distributing
free binaries of it (which was the trigger for Collabora to leave in
the first place)

The statement is not correct.
Collabora actually agreed to negotiate the details of LOOL's binaries distribution so that is definitely not the trigger of the fork.

  - is quite a hostile move. It would also be beyond
tricky for TDF to message that to the general (FLOSS-affine) public.

I believe TDF has demonstrated to be everything but hostile even when the project it hosted and was part of the LibreOffice project has been forked without warnings.

The evolving consensus in the board it
seems (though of course I cannot speak for them), is that TDF should
for the moment close the chapter of LibreOffice Online.

More than a consensus I believe that we may have to resign to the fact that we may have been left with not many options unless other members of the board and the community come up with some practical options.

All the best,

-- Thorsten

Ciao

Paolo

Paolo Vecchi wrote:

> The evolving consensus in the board it
> seems (though of course I cannot speak for them), is that TDF should
> for the moment close the chapter of LibreOffice Online.

More than a consensus I believe that we may have to resign to the fact that
we may have been left with not many options unless other members of the
board and the community come up with some practical options.

Which seems to be essentially the same conclusion.

Let's end this thread here. If there's new ideas, or new, constructive
input on Marco's proposal, that is of course welcome (ideally as a new
thread, or as answers to the original email).

Best,

-- Thorsten