Re: [board-discuss] Enable TDF to contribute more code to LibreOffice with in-house developers to address our donors specific needs

Hi Andras,

Andreas Mantke wrote on 08/02/2022 18:58:

> > The best person that can teach you how to fish is an experienced
> > fisherman.

My example would be fruit grower and fruit picker (after all, the apple 
came before the fisherman ;) ) but apart from that:

> but it wouldn't improve the situation, if - like today - the experienced
> fisherman / fishermen take every new talented fisher immediately from
> the free software developer (volunteer) market.

Could be. After all it is one of the ideas behind for example GSoC.
On the other hand, in case it works out like that, it is good news on 
two fronts: apparently the commercial ecosystem party has enough income 
to hire someone extra; and also there still will be budget for us to 
hire mentors.
We also know that developers from commercial ecosystem parties are 
involved in getting mentors up to speed. So the whole picture does not 
have to look that bad, I think.

So spending that are intended to further grow the possibility of 
(relative new) developers to contribute (by mentoring, tooling, events), 
are a strong impulse to grow that side of the developer community and 
enabling more working people to help with code they think is useful.

> Thus there is now chance for a divers market with a lot of small and
> local businesses around the LibreOffice project. Thus the (business)

I remember we discussed possibilities in the past, that would enable 
relative independent new developers to get funded for work on 
LibreOffice. I think that is a good idea to grow the commercial ecosystem.

> user of LibreOffice will not get the opportunity to choose between
> different service provider.

Compared to various other open source projects, TDF/LibreOffice isn't 
doing that bad.
On the other hand, we can't blame projects for how they work as long as 
people are free to study, change, share, fork, ..

> If this situation will not change immediately the LibreOffice
> certification program will not give a competitive edge.

I love TDF for its work: being the place where all stakeholders meet and 
try to bring the best in the shared projects.
Then with my experience in a broad variety of commercial, volunteer and 
public entities, I'm far from convinced that it leads to anything good 
when a foundation tries to bend the forces that drive a commercial market.

Cheers,
Cor

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