Enable TDF to contribute more code to LibreOffice with in-house developers to address our donors specific needs

To give this discussion another spin: We pondered in the team about hiring a web developer. Someone between infra, code, mentoring and design. This person could also care about extension development (an area where users can participate in the development without knowing C++).

But in any case we are looking for a very special fisherwoman, and the experience from the past makes me think she's rather a mermaid than a real person.

Hi Daniel,

Daniel A. Rodriguez píše v Út 08. 02. 2022 v 19:31 -0300:

I think Andreas hits the nail on the head when he mentions that in
other
projects no company dominates the project or the community.

The contrary is true: Most of the successful open source projects have
a major, dominating company behind them - have a look at Nextcloud
(Nextcloud GmbH), ownCloud (ownCloud GmbH), MariaDB (MariaDB
Corporation Ag), ... and I can continue on and on.

In LibreOffice, there is no dominating company. Many like to paint
Collabora as one, but it is not the case due to how the founding
members (and I was one of them) have designed the TDF (with the 1/3
rule in the bodies and other means to protect from the project
domination) and due to how the German charity laws work.

Also, such thinking is very offensive to eg. Allotropia - who is doing
a great job undermining any kind of potential domination by excellent
engineering; have a look at their impressive WASM prototype.

But if you want to see an open source project with no company behind
them, have a look at Apache OpenOffice.

All the best,
Kendy

Hi Cor,

do you mind explaining to us what you mean with the sentence below?

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

Ciao

Paolo

Hi Simon,

thank you for sharing your opinions with us.

On 08/02/2022 19:44, Simon Phipps wrote:

Hi Andreas!

On Tue, Feb 8, 2022 at 5:59 PM Andreas Mantke <maand@gmx.de> wrote:

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.

Thus there is now chance for a divers market with a lot of small and
local businesses around the LibreOffice project. Thus the (business)
user of LibreOffice will not get the opportunity to choose between
different service provider.

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

I agree with Andreas that this is a great opportunity for TDF to extend its in-house skills which in turn could also provide more opportunities to enable new ecosystem contributors.

I’m sure there are many developers eager to join TDF to start working directly with the wider community with a great team that is with us not for the sake of having a job but because they passionately believe in what they are doing.

Do you believe TDF could spend donated funds on the salaries of developers who write LibreOffice, Andreas? As I recall when we were on the Board you asserted this would be an improper use of TDF’s funding under its bylaws?

It depends on the rationale.

If we perform specific tasks in-house, we create knowledge and skills within TDF that can be freely shared with the wider community. That’s a win-win for everyone. Accessibility is a field where we’re already active which requires further in-house investments but many other areas need further research and development to allow us to share documentation and knowledge which otherwise could be not made available by third parties.
There are many areas that are not economically relevant or interesting for volunteers and commercial contributors in which we must step in by investing in members of the team that will help in fulfilling our mission.

For those unaware: TDF has previously extensively considered the proposal to employ LibreOffice developers, which is, as Daniel has commented, superficially very appealing. However, wanting something is not the same as it being possible to have something!

For those unaware: some members of the current board had to fight hard since day one of their term to show others that a proposed project for a third party entity was suboptimal due to lack of proper analysis and investigation on what are the factors that could limit TDF.
The good thing that came out of that proposal is that finally we went through a proper legal analysis which has shown that some limitations that held back TDF were actually not there.

The reasons we do not currently have internal developers include (among others):

  • The question of whether TDF can spend money developing software. It has been asserted that it cannot.

It has been asserted through overdue legal consultations that we can invest money in many more ways that has been previously thought to fulfil our mission.

We now have a mentor that will train new developers, with varying degrees of experience, in how to develop for LibreOffice which will not only help in furthering the educational and research scope of LibreOffice with code but will also grow into mentors themselves allowing TDF to deliver more on its educational purpose and furthers its civic engagement which is another charitable purpose of TDF.

Not having had dedicated in-house developers did reduce our capability to fully deliver on our objectives, which are clearly stated in our statutes, so now that we have the necessary legal clarifications we should improve this situation immediately.

  • The question of who would decide what was written, and how, and how developers would be properly managed.

This is an organisational issue which will follow what is written in the proposal and I’m sure our ED, mentor and the rest of the Team will do a fabulous job in integrating the new developers.

In regards to what and how they will do it see my proposal. Depending on the skills that the developers already have they may initially focus on A11y or long standing bugs but then we will encourage them to grow in different areas so they can fully express the skills they are most comfortable with and that will benefit the community even more.

  • Related to this, the moral imperative that TDF should not compete with its trustees.

I see a few issues with this statement:

  1. How can we be in competition with trustees as they are individual members of our community who committed to help TDF and the rest of the community in many ways, not only code, to further our objectives?

  2. Even if you used the word trustees by mistake while you meant commercial contributors they surely read our statutes and our objectives so they positioned themselves to serve their own commercial clients without being concerned by TDF’s objectives.

  3. There is not only a moral but also regulatory and statutory imperative for TDF to pursue its objectives for the good of LibreOffice and its community so trustees and commercial contributors should actually be supportive and enable TDF in moving better and faster instead of trying to stop TDF in doing what it has been created to do.

While I do not necessarily agree with the thinking behind these issues, any proposal before the Board would need a thoughtful and balanced proposal for resolving each of them.

Now you should have a clearer view regarding the rationale behind the proposal and how the objections put forward are not valid any more.

All these issues could have been solved years ago but it seems we needed a suboptimal proposal presented at FOSDEM 2020 to start a process of verification and validation of what TDF can and can’t do.

TDF can and absolutely should invest in in-house developers to fulfil its objective for the benefit of the whole community while still complying with the parameters imposed by its charitable foundation status that have been purposefully chosen.

The community and our valuable members of the ecosystem have been asking us to invest more in development and now that we have finally gone through legal verifications we could start looking for new members of our team even today.

We can surely start within TDF and then evaluate over time if a fully owned and fully controlled subsidiary may allow us to deal with our growth in a more efficient way.

As it has been mentioned by a fellow director I looked at how the great people at Typo3 organised things. Typo3 is a non for profit that funds its fully owned company to deal with developers employment and commercial activities. It has been proposed to invite them to a board meeting to share their experience and we should actually do that so that we can evaluate a future option.

Perhaps one of the folk supporting the Board agenda item would like to write a paper that does that?

Putting the burden of writing papers on a member of the board is clearly not the most efficient way to deal with things and, as it happened already a few times, it gives the impression of being just a delay tactic for which I see no valid reasons.

I do appreciate that you learned from your past mistakes and that you now want to see more transparency and evidence that we actually did our research and analysis of the issues and the opportunities. There are documents available to the board which prove we did our job correctly but as they are part of interactions with legal experts the board will have to agree to make them public.

Cheers

Simon

Ciao

Paolo

Hi Paolo,

Paolo Vecchi píše v St 09. 02. 2022 v 15:09 +0100:

The community and our valuable members of the ecosystem have been
asking us to invest more in development

It is important to understand that "community" means "contributors"; as
opposed to "users". "Users" are not part of the "community", until
they start contributing; via code, QA, translations, marketing under
the TDF umbrella, etc.

With that in mind - can you please point us to those requests?

Thank you!

All the best,
Kendy

Hi Kendy,

Hi Paolo,

Paolo Vecchi píše v St 09. 02. 2022 v 15:09 +0100:

The community and our valuable members of the ecosystem have been
asking us to invest more in development

It is important to understand that "community" means "contributors"; as
opposed to "users". "Users" are not part of the "community", until
they start contributing; via code, QA, translations, marketing under
the TDF umbrella, etc.

With that in mind - can you please point us to those requests?

Sorry to be so insistent about RTL/CJK, but to illustrate what it means, see this bug:
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=104597#c40
it is months on the ESC minutes and it's very impacting for Arabic versions. This is one on the top of my head, but there are more of them on fonts, etc.
If you look at the names commenting this issue, you'll see several contributors here.

Cheers
Sophie

Hi Sophi!

Hi Kendy,

Hi Paolo,

Paolo Vecchi píše v St 09. 02. 2022 v 15:09 +0100:

The community and our valuable members of the ecosystem have been
asking us to invest more in development

It is important to understand that “community” means “contributors”; as
opposed to “users”. “Users” are not part of the “community”, until
they start contributing; via code, QA, translations, marketing under
the TDF umbrella, etc.

With that in mind - can you please point us to those requests?

Sorry to be so insistent about RTL/CJK, but to illustrate what it means,
see this bug:
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=104597#c40
it is months on the ESC minutes and it’s very impacting for Arabic
versions. This is one on the top of my head, but there are more of them
on fonts, etc.
If you look at the names commenting this issue, you’ll see several
contributors here.

Do you have any insight into why the community has not chosen to fix the issue please?

Thanks

Simon

Hi Simon,

Hi Sophi!

Hi Kendy,

Hi Paolo,

Paolo Vecchi píše v St 09. 02. 2022 v 15:09 +0100:

The community and our valuable members of the ecosystem have been
asking us to invest more in development

It is important to understand that "community" means "contributors"; as
opposed to "users". "Users" are not part of the "community", until
they start contributing; via code, QA, translations, marketing under
the TDF umbrella, etc.

With that in mind - can you please point us to those requests?

Sorry to be so insistent about RTL/CJK, but to illustrate what it means,
see this bug:
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=104597#c40
it is months on the ESC minutes and it's very impacting for Arabic
versions. This is one on the top of my head, but there are more of them
on fonts, etc.
If you look at the names commenting this issue, you'll see several
contributors here.

Do you have any insight into why the community has not chosen to fix the
issue please?

Reading through the bug (which was only an example) and other contributions, I don't think we can say that the community has not chosen to fix their issues.

Cheers
Sophie

sophi wrote:

> Do you have any insight into why the community has not chosen to fix the
> issue please?

Reading through the bug (which was only an example) and other contributions,
I don't think we can say that the community has not chosen to fix their
issues.

Wasn't that meant to be tendered?

Cheers,

-- Thorsten

Yep.

Hi Kendy,

Hi Daniel,

Daniel A. Rodriguez píše v Út 08. 02. 2022 v 19:31 -0300:

I think Andreas hits the nail on the head when he mentions that in
other
projects no company dominates the project or the community.

The contrary is true: Most of the successful open source projects have
a major, dominating company behind them - have a look at Nextcloud
(Nextcloud GmbH), ownCloud (ownCloud GmbH), MariaDB (MariaDB
Corporation Ag), ... and I can continue on and on.

I believe that the examples you mentioned actually confirm what Daniel said.

NextCloud has been forked from ownCloud apparently for divergences on levels of "openness" which may have something to do with some commercial choices on which Frank had no control but he can surely explain it better than me:

https://karlitschek.de/2016/04/big-changes-i-am-leaving-owncloud-inc-today/

Was Frank feeling that the commercial drive was clashing with his Open Source ethos?
He asked himself quite a few interesting questions:
"Without sharing too much, there are some moral questions popping up for me. Who owns the community? Who owns ownCloud itself? And what matters more, short term money or long term responsibility and growth? Is ownCloud just another company or do we also have to answer to the hundreds of volunteers who contribute and make it what it is today?"

Shouldn't we all ask ourselves the same questions?

MariaDB has been created as Oracle acquired Sun/MySQL and the contributors didn't seem to like the idea.
MariaDB Foundation has actively chosen not to get involved much in writing code while we actually have the contrary in our statutes.

Another organisation has been created as the community didn't want to be dominated by commercial interests of a single company.

In its announcement a founder stated:

"We believe that the Foundation is a key step for the evolution of the free office suite, as it liberates the development of the code and the evolution of the project from the constraints represented by the commercial interests of a single company. Free software advocates around the world have the extraordinary opportunity of joining the group of founding members today, to write a completely new chapter in the history of FLOSS"

In LibreOffice, there is no dominating company. Many like to paint
Collabora as one, but it is not the case due to how the founding
members (and I was one of them) have designed the TDF (with the 1/3
rule in the bodies and other means to protect from the project
domination) and due to how the German charity laws work.

I believe it's important to clarify that we are talking about TDF, the Foundation that is the home of LibreOffice and its community, not "just" about LibreOffice.

In terms of code contributions Collabora has a large impact as it's first in front of the "Unknown" category, RedHat, TDF and Allotropia.
As Italo said during FOSDEM code commits isn't all there is in terms of contributions so we'll probably have to look more closely at the data to celebrate the value of the many others that contribute to the project.

In terms of influence in TDF, Collabora has quite a large impact looking at the members in some of TDF's bodies so it would be great to have better representation.

The 1/3 rule is good but I guess that when it has been written when people were looking at a scenario were board members could have represented a very diverse and large number of commercial organisations. They probably didn't think there could be a company with employees, suppliers and their business partners in the same board.

There is work to do to understand why TDF hasn't been able to retain some of its contributors over the years and what we should do to attract more, not necessarily only developers, to have more people that can bring in new ways to look at the problems that all Open Source projects have to deal with and find solutions that work for our community.

Also, such thinking is very offensive to eg. Allotropia - who is doing
a great job undermining any kind of potential domination by excellent
engineering;

Allotropia has great developers with great potential for contributions.

  have a look at their impressive WASM prototype.

Allotropia is doing great with the WASM prototype and I reiterate my proposal to agree on a shared outcome in case investments from TDF are to be considered with some interest.

But if you want to see an open source project with no company behind
them, have a look at Apache OpenOffice.

If I'm not mistaken the vast majority of contributors to Apache OpenOffice decided to move away as they didn't want to be dominated by companies' commercial interests :wink:

Anyway the point here isn't to not have a commercial ecosystem, quite the contrary as we need more diversity to avoid creating a kind of "group thinking" that limits the board points of view about the issues we face and the solutions available.

Probably we should go back to the origins to see what the founders wanted TDF to be:

"The Document Foundation is an independent self-governing democratic Foundation created by leading
members of the OpenOffice.org Community. It continues to build on the Foundation of ten years'
dedicated work by the OpenOffice.org community, and was created in the belief that an independent
Foundation is the best fit to the Community's core values of openness, transparency, and valuing
people for their contribution. It is open to any individual who agrees with our core values and
contributes to our activities, and welcomes corporate participation, e.g. by sponsoring individuals
to work as equals alongside other contributors in the community."

https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/announce/msg00000.html

All the best,
Kendy

Ciao

Paolo

Hi,

Hi Daniel,

Daniel A. Rodriguez píše v Út 08. 02. 2022 v 19:31 -0300:

I think Andreas hits the nail on the head when he mentions that in
other
projects no company dominates the project or the community.

The contrary is true: Most of the successful open source projects have
a major, dominating company behind them - have a look at Nextcloud
(Nextcloud GmbH), ownCloud (ownCloud GmbH), MariaDB (MariaDB
Corporation Ag), ... and I can continue on and on.

once I read this sentences the first time, I thought I was in a
different film in 2010. But maybe I didn't understand the situation in
OOo project at that time.

Maybe this is due to the fact that I hadn't been at the dinner of an
inner circle during the Budapest conference.

In LibreOffice, there is no dominating company. Many like to paint
Collabora as one, but it is not the case due to how the founding
members (and I was one of them) have designed the TDF (with the 1/3

Sorry, but the founder of TDF was the association 'Freies Office
Deutschland e.V. (FrODeV)' with money from the world wide supporting
community.

rule in the bodies and other means to protect from the project
domination) and due to how the German charity laws work.

After some years in the LibreOffice project and TDF I reconsider that
the one third rule should have been one seat at maximum for an
organization. This would have lead to a more divers formation of TDF's
bodies.

But that is something that could be fixed only with high effort in case
there is a will to go in that direction.

Also, such thinking is very offensive to eg. Allotropia - who is doing
a great job undermining any kind of potential domination by excellent
engineering; have a look at their impressive WASM prototype.

But if you want to see an open source project with no company behind
them, have a look at Apache OpenOffice.

Sorry, but there are other OSS projects with a lot of business
contributors with different sizes and a balanced impact on the project.
In my view such a structure / ecosystem is much more healthy.

Regards,
Andreas

Hi Paolo,

Paolo Vecchi píše v St 09. 02. 2022 v 19:56 +0100:

He asked himself quite a few interesting questions:
"Without sharing too much, there are some moral questions popping up
for
me. Who owns the community? Who owns ownCloud itself? And what
matters
more, short term money or long term responsibility and growth? Is
ownCloud just another company or do we also have to answer to the
hundreds of volunteers who contribute and make it what it is today?"

Shouldn't we all ask ourselves the same questions?

Awesome - so now you finally understand how hard a decision it was for
us (Free Software lovers & contributors for decades) to move the LOOL
development to GitHub - because it was the result of asking & pondering
the same questions. Thank you for that!

Particularly:

* TDF does not own the community, TDF is an organization designed to
  make the community (let me repeat, "community" = "group of
  contributors") strong & flourishing.

* TDF does not own LibreOffice itself; it owns the brand, but the code,
  translations, etc. is owned by the particular contributors (ie. by
  the community) - to the level of lines of code, strings of
  translations, icons painted, test cases provided, etc.

* Long term responsibility & growth matter more - and when the LOOL's
  (sub-)community didn't grow under TDF, it was time to move on. The
  decisions shouldn't be about donation money.

And regarding the last one: "Is TDF just another foundation or do we
also have to answer to the hundreds of volunteers who contribute and
make it what it is today?" is for us, the new board, to improve -
because from what I can see, TDF was not listening to the contributors
the last 2 years too much.

Let's improve it together!

All the best,
Kendy

Hi Kendy,

On 09/02/2022 15:57, Jan Holesovsky wrote:

Hi Paolo,

Paolo Vecchi píše v St 09. 02. 2022 v 15:09 +0100:

The community and our valuable members of the ecosystem have been
asking us to invest more in development

It is important to understand that "community" means "contributors"; as
opposed to "users".  "Users" are not part of the "community", until
they start contributing; via code, QA, translations, marketing under
the TDF umbrella, etc.

I’m sorry but I have to strongly disagree with your statement.

“contributors” are not opposed to “users” as users, which are/could become contributors at any time, are amongst the main beneficiaries of all TDF does as from our statutes and mission as a Foundation.

We do encourage users to contribute in any way they can even with simple things like filing a bug or simply promoting LibreOffice to their friends and family helps our community. Even the simple fact that they use LibreOffice can be part of fulfilling our goals as it helps with the “distribution of FLOSS philosophical and cultural ideals”.

On libreoffice.org we can also read:
“LibreOffice is Free and Open Source Software. Development is open to new talent and new ideas, and our software is tested and used daily by a large and devoted user community.”

Even Collabora’s own forum includes users in their own community “competent community of users, integrators, and developers”

I think that, as part of the on-boarding process, we should include a session hosted by Florian and Mike Schinagl that clarifies to all why TDF has been created, what its role is and what we should all keep in mind while performing our duties as members of the board.

With that in mind - can you please point us to those requests?

There are plenty of examples in board’s public and private meetings and even in articles that have been published quoting members of the ecosystem.

Eg:
‘TDF has around €1.5m in the bank, Meeks said, but something that may surprise outsiders is that the foundation cannot and does not use that money to employ developers.’

‘Thorsten Behrens, IT lead for LibreOffice at CIB, told The Register he was “99 per cent in agreement” with Meeks, adding: “The TDF is a charity; it’s not in the business of developing software and actually cannot, because that would put it in competition with the commercial ecosystem,” as well as threatening its charitable status.’

or

'Turning TDF donations into feature/function improvements is not only a process that at best is approximately 10% of that total development…"

These clear calls, from 2020, for TDF to invest more in developers have been listened to and some misconceptions, which have been holding back TDF for a long time, have been clarified.

Some comments are very odd as we know that “The objective of the foundation is the promotion and development of office software available for use by anyone free of charge.” and it isn’t clear at all how improving LibreOffice could be in competition with the commercial ecosystem, the commercial ecosystem partners focus on their own market segment with their own services which TDF doesn’t provide.

So, as things are much clearer, we can now get to work to make TDF an active code contributor which will help in making LibreOffice better for all.

Thank you!

All the best,
Kendy

Ciao

Paolo

Hi Kendy,

Am 10.02.2022 um 10:49 schrieb Jan Holesovsky:

because from what I can see, TDF was not listening to the contributors
the last 2 years too much.

sorry to step in here but at this point I have to take part:

It was one of my first and foremost task as chair - and let me add it was hard time consuming work - that everybody was heard and could speak, it is simply not true, that contributors wasn’t heard.

It is a different issue, if all of that got a majority in deciding in the board or was convincing everybody, there you could certainly be different opinion, but not for the pure fact if contributors wasn’t heard.

I think this is worth to differentiate. Nevertheless there is always room for improvement, for which the new board certainly should reach out.
Thanks
Lothar

Hi Lothar,

Lothar K. Becker píše v Čt 10. 02. 2022 v 11:12 +0100:

It was one of my first and foremost task as chair - and let me add it
was hard time consuming work - that everybody was heard and could
speak, it is simply not true, that contributors wasn't heard.

I am sorry, I didn't mean to offend you. I've seen it myself in the
public parts of the calls I were attending how hard a job it must have
been for you given the conditions, and I am sure you *yourself* made
everything to listen very carefully - thank you for that!

And the same way - I want thank everyone who were carefully listening &
considering, instead of just pushing their agenda.

All the best,
Kendy

Hi,

Some parts of LibreOffice are not covered by the ecosystem…
Although we sometimes have customers who ask for improvements :
May be those topics below are not fashionable but they contribute to give some credibility to LibreOffice

  • VBA compatibility

  • Basic bugs

  • Base enhancement

  • Python support

  • Math equation

  • Slide transition

  • documents signature support (CNG api)

  • All most annoying bugs…

All the best

Le jeu. 10 févr. 2022 à 11:30, Jan Holesovsky <kendy@documentfoundation.org> a écrit :

Hi Lothar,

Lothar K. Becker píše v Čt 10. 02. 2022 v 11:12 +0100:

It was one of my first and foremost task as chair - and let me add it
was hard time consuming work - that everybody was heard and could
speak, it is simply not true, that contributors wasn’t heard.

I am sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you. I’ve seen it myself in the
public parts of the calls I were attending how hard a job it must have
been for you given the conditions, and I am sure you yourself made
everything to listen very carefully - thank you for that!

And the same way - I want thank everyone who were carefully listening &
considering, instead of just pushing their agenda.

All the best,
Kendy


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Hi Regis,

Regis Perdreau píše v Čt 10. 02. 2022 v 11:21 +0100:

Some parts of LibreOffice are not covered by the ecosystem...
Although we sometimes have customers who ask for improvements :

If you talk about customers - it sounds like there is a company willing
to pay to fix those. With my Collabora hat on, I'd love somebody from
our company to talk to those customers to see what we can offer them.

But with my TDF hat on - why should TDF, paid by donations from real,
living people, use those donations to employ developers to fix stuff
for enterprises?

May be those topics below are not fashionable but they contribute to
give some credibility to LibreOffice

- VBA compatibility
- Basic bugs
- Base enhancement
- Python support
- Math equation
- Slide transition
- documents signature support (CNG api)
- All most annoying bugs...

I didn't check how many of these were proposed for tendering - but I
think some of these were. Can you please add the missing ones as
proposals, so that it is possible to rate them & see which of them are
in line with the TDF goals & TDF can tender them?

Thank you very much!

All the best,
Kendy

Hi *,

Paolo Vecchi wrote:

> It is important to understand that "community" means "contributors"; as
> opposed to "users". "Users" are not part of the "community", until
> they start contributing; via code, QA, translations, marketing under
> the TDF umbrella, etc.

I'm sorry but I have to strongly disagree with your statement.

In fact Paolo wasn't disagreeing so much, just stressed that users
should be encouraged to become contributors.

That's indeed a very important, and perhaps an under-used approach to
increase overall contributions in the project!

On the statement per se, that we (as in, TDF, and its board in
particular) predominantly need to care and listen to our contributors,
I would believe there's hardly any disagreement in the community.

I think that, as part of the on-boarding process, we should include a
session hosted by Florian and Mike Schinagl that clarifies to all why TDF
has been created, what its role is and what we should all keep in mind while
performing our duties as members of the board.

While it is important for the new board to know what TDF can, and
cannot do (and in fact Paolo will find an email in his inbox, where
Florian is announcing exactly such an onboarding), the role of the
board is the opposite - to lead, within the limits of the charitable
laws, where the community needs us to go.

Looking at the reasons why TDF was started almost 12 years ago
shouldn't be the sole guiding principle. Living in the past is not a
good board strategy.

I'll not comment on the quotes out of a press article, shown without
much context and lacking a link to the original source (which would be
good practice). The article
(https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/16/libreoffice_ecosystem_beyond_utterly_broken/)
was written in the context of the LOOL and MarComm plan discussions,
and the fallout around the LibreOffice Personal / LibreOffice
Community arguments. I recommend reading it in full.

Finally, on the apparent contradiction between what Andreas (lawyer,
TDF founder, long-term board member) and Paolo state on what TDF is
permitted to do: this is part of an ongoing discussion with various
experts.

I would much prefer not discussing difficult legal matters on a public
list.

Cheers,

-- Thorsten

Hi all,

* Members of the ecosystem and others also suggested that we should
    spend more money in development
  * Bugs, a11y issues and features can be harder to taken care of by
    volunteers and are not always addressed by the ecosystem
  * We need to build up internal skills and development capabilities to
    speed up innovation

I agree here that there are several areas like CJK and CTL (and not only for bug fixes) or ally that should deserve much more love from TDF and I'm sure our donors would be happy that we invest in this area too.

That would help also to grow this part of the community, which is very complicated to achieve when our version is difficult to use.

That sounds like a good approach to me, in particular for areas where there's currently no specific interest from ecosystem companies or volunteers and that are unsuitable for tenders, but considered important for the community.
I would see that in line with how TDF already employs non-developer staff to take care of other important aspects not (sufficiently) covered by other contributors.

I have the impression that a fundamentally important question is what the purpose/task of TDF-internal developers would be.

If larger topics that TDF-internal developers were to work on were first agreed on in the bodies where ecosystem companies are present as well (like ESC and/or the board), my expectation would be that the development work from different sides should work together nicely, rather than creating any kind of destructive competition.
(Ecosystem company products profit from contributions made to LibreOffice as well, and having a better overall product should in my opinion also increase the range of potentially interested customers in general.)

Of course, in case the main intention were for TDF to provide more business-like services (like an LTS version or creating an impression of "donate a certain amount of money and your pet bug will be fixed"), I see very well how that might interfere significantly with the business model of ecosystem companies.

Assuming members in the involved LibreOffice/TDF bodies found a way to work together constructively, my current impression is that this approach could be for the benefit of all.

However, I must admit I don't know the ecosystem company perspective first-hand, so would be interested in learning more about specific concerns.

Best regards,
Michael