How is TDC compelled to keep the user first?

Other Free Software projects have had for-profit entities created underneath the stewardship of a non-profit; Mozilla Corporation and Canonical are two living examples. Sacrifices to user empowerment are often made at Mozilla Corporation (e.g. Pocket integration, advertising partnerships to silently install code on browsers, etc. - The list grows longer by the month as new scandals appear). Canonical has made similar sacrifices (e.g. Ubuntu One proprietary service integration, cease-and-desists towards fixubuntu.com).

1. How would TDF intend to protect users against the inevitable temptations to prioritize money/brand over users/computing ethics? "We can always pull the plug" is not a compelling argument as that's only used for the direst of circumstances, not the slow poisoning of the well that Mozilla have experienced.

2. How will TDF assure communities that the creation of a for-profit entity to manage branding that the above examples will not occur?

3. What assurances does TDF offer that assuage fears that the lifeblood of LibreOffice will pivot from one of community involvement to one of company culture (with community involvement as a PR spin)?

Thank you for your time.

Other Free Software projects have had for-profit entities created underneath the stewardship of a non-profit; Mozilla Corporation and Canonical are two living examples. Sacrifices to user empowerment are

off-topic, but: how is Canonical related to any non-profit?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_Ltd doesn't mention anything.

3. What assurances does TDF offer that assuage fears that the lifeblood of LibreOffice will pivot from one of community involvement to one of company culture (with community involvement as a PR spin)?

what exactly do you mean? the majority of bugfixes and new features already come from developers employed by companies such as Red Hat, Collabora, CIB, and this has been the case for most of the existence of the project. of course most if not all of the developers employed by these companies consider themselves members of the LO community, and why shouldn't they?

Hi Brett,

  First thank you for your questions; cogent, lucid, well articulated &
challenging :slight_smile:

Other Free Software projects have had for-profit entities created
underneath the stewardship of a non-profit; Mozilla Corporation and
Canonical are two living examples.

  Perhaps in both these cases - the difference is exclusive ownership of
the TM here, and they totally dominate their ecosystems & communities
whether intentionally or not. I guess Mozilla looks to me structurally
not unlike TDF plus TDF's captive business entity.

  Similarly the intention with TDC is not to build a Mozilla style
monolith that hires developers - but to contract that out in order to
grow the number of independent companies & individuals contributing to
development. That can help to build the ecosystem. Over time - new
companies and individuals will want to diversify their revenue sources
and evangelize LibreOffice to new customers, and niches. We saw this
historically with Nokia's investment into Maemo - a flourishing of many
companies and interest and investment.

Canonical has made similar
sacrifices (e.g. Ubuntu One proprietary service integration,
cease-and-desists towards fixubuntu.com).

  I know nothing of the specifics here. TDC will emphatically not own the
LibreOffice brand: TDF will.

  TDC will have a limited, unilaterally terminate-able license and
limited exclusivity to use it in app-stores.

  So in the case of a (critical?) website - TDF could give them a license
to use the brand in a suitable way as now; why not.

1. How would TDF intend to protect users against the inevitable
temptations to prioritize money/brand over users/computing ethics? "We
can always pull the plug" is not a compelling argument as that's only
used for the direst of circumstances, not the slow poisoning of the well
that Mozilla have experienced.

  I would imagine that the TDF members can elect boards that would put
pressure on TDC to stop doing that ultimately up to and including the
option of pulling the plug by choosing to revoke TDC's TM license
unilaterally.

2. How will TDF assure communities that the creation of a for-profit
entity to manage branding that the above examples will not occur?

  Hmm; I don't see TDC as managing branding, I would expect TDF to do
that. I would expect TDC to follow the branding coming out of the
marketing / UX teams in the community - that TDF are involved with.

3. What assurances does TDF offer that assuage fears that the lifeblood
of LibreOffice will pivot from one of community involvement to one of
company culture (with community involvement as a PR spin)?

  So - I think this is an excellent question for any corporate or
non-profit's involvement in FLOSS. It is the same question whenever TDF
hires a staff member to do something the community can also do - and
there really is no easy answer. TDF staff (typically) have a heavy focus
on not per-se doing the job, but growing and enabling the community
around doing that job.

  Beyond that, having many diverse entities and individuals contributing
is surely a good thing; certainly rather than a monolithic organization
which both Mozilla & Ubuntu are.

  My 2 cents anyway,

  ATB,

    Michael.

Hi Brett!

Other Free Software projects have had for-profit entities created underneath the stewardship of a non-profit; Mozilla Corporation and Canonical are two living examples. Sacrifices to user empowerment are often made at Mozilla Corporation (e.g. Pocket integration, advertising partnerships to silently install code on browsers, etc. - The list grows longer by the month as new scandals appear). Canonical has made similar sacrifices (e.g. Ubuntu One proprietary service integration, cease-and-desists towards fixubuntu.com).

  1. How would TDF intend to protect users against the inevitable temptations to prioritize money/brand over users/computing ethics? “We can always pull the plug” is not a compelling argument as that’s only used for the direst of circumstances, not the slow poisoning of the well that Mozilla have experienced.

This is overstating TDC’s vision, so the comparisons are massively unhelpful. It is being created to put the LibreOffice package TDF makes into the Windows and Mac appstores on TDF’s behalf, and collect a small payment for the convenience. It will make clear the origin of the software as far as it is allowed to by those stores. It will spend the money paying developers in the community (both larger and smaller) to improve LibreOffice, through the usual TDF ESC processes. So no significant mission is leaving TDF. This is all in the CIC36 community support statement, which is this hadn’t blown up now for some reason I was planning to post next week once the steering group agreed it. Your concerns relate to a company creating a product and operating independently of the community, which is not what’s proposed here.

  1. How will TDF assure communities that the creation of a for-profit entity to manage branding that the above examples will not occur?

TDC is not managing TDF’s branding. It just has a narrow, well-bounded license to act on TDF’s behalf in app stores. Full stop.

  1. What assurances does TDF offer that assuage fears that the lifeblood of LibreOffice will pivot from one of community involvement to one of company culture (with community involvement as a PR spin)?

Because we’re not creating that sort of corporate vehicle.

Cheers,

Simon
(proposed CEO for TDC and former TDF director)

Other Free Software projects have had for-profit entities created underneath the stewardship of a non-profit; Mozilla Corporation and Canonical are two living examples. Sacrifices to user empowerment are

off-topic, but: how is Canonical related to any non-profit?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_Ltd doesn't mention anything.

Mark Shuttleworth began the Ubuntu project with the express intention of keeping Ubuntu for the community while also creating Canonical as a for-profit company in an attempt to make a consumer-grade support/development experience. Ubuntu has a board wherein Canonical members were allotted a maximum number of a seats to guarantee community member additions. (Disclaimer, I haven't spent much time in the Ubuntu ecosystem for some number of years now so things may have changed).

Over time, the boundaries between Ubuntu/Canonical dissolved as more user-hostile measures made its way into Ubuntu - Not enough money was being made from Ubuntu's lackluster business models (AFAICT, selling *tshirts* was practically the only long-term revenue stream they retained...) so the Ubuntu platform slowly degraded into a distribution that went from "not recommended by the FSF" to outright labelled as spyware.

I believe that Canonical is related here because, like TDC, the proposal appears to be that a for-profit entity be given exclusive rights to a trademark to a supposed community-owned product. Like TDC, Canonical's founding idealized Shuttleworth's pessimism that free software could survive without a for-profit entity as its protector.

3. What assurances does TDF offer that assuage fears that the lifeblood of LibreOffice will pivot from one of community involvement to one of company culture (with community involvement as a PR spin)?

what exactly do you mean? the majority of bugfixes and new features already come from developers employed by companies such as Red Hat, Collabora, CIB, and this has been the case for most of the existence of the project. of course most if not all of the developers employed by these companies consider themselves members of the LO community, and why shouldn't they?

Like the Linux kernel, the product's ecosystem benefits greatly from external for-profit organizations' contributions! But I would point out that these businesses do not own the LibreOffice product itself - they merely contribute or create their own commercial fork. There's nothing wrong with this, of course! But imagine if Debian had granted rights to its trademark exclusively to Canonical back in 2005. Debian would be a very different distribution today if it were under the stewardship of an entity expected to turn profits. And the community would likely not be happy with the Debian project as a whole: It'd be just another consumer distro and the tenets guiding Debian's community would have likely withered.

Simon claims that I'm overstating TDC's influence - that will be addressed in its relevant thread. My reply here is only to expound on how I found Canonical relevant to my questions.

Correction: Could *not* survive without a for-profit entity as its protector.

That assertion about TDC is also incorrect. Far from the implication you make, TDC is being granted only the necessary rights to act as TDF’s agent in the app stores. Nothing more. TDF still controls the overall LibreOffice trademark, and TDF also licenses it to other entities in the ecosystem like CIB, Collabora and the retailers of various clothing. The license is exclusive only in the app stores, and that is because TDF will also be acting against knock-off apps selling the brand in ways that reflect poorly on LibreOffice. Again, the attempt to equate this to Canonical is very unhelpful, although your parting shot is illuminating.

S.

It seems to me that TDF hasn't been efficient in fighting against unauthorized use of the brand. The app stores are full of "liberoffices". Why not doing this by TDC?

Hi Simon,

Am 02.03.2020 um 11:02 schrieb Simon Phipps:

On Mon, Mar 2, 2020 at 4:32 AM Brett Cornwall <brett@i–b.com> wrote:

I believe that Canonical is related here because, like TDC, the proposal
appears to be that a for-profit entity be given exclusive rights to a
trademark to a supposed community-owned product. Like TDC, Canonical’s
founding idealized Shuttleworth’s pessimism that free software could
survive without a for-profit entity as its protector.

That assertion about TDC is also incorrect. Far from the implication you make, TDC is being granted only the necessary rights to act as TDF’s agent in the app stores. Nothing more. TDF still controls the overall LibreOffice trademark, and TDF also licenses it to other entities in the ecosystem like CIB, Collabora and the retailers of various clothing. The license is exclusive only in the app stores, and that is because TDF will also be acting against knock-off apps selling the brand in ways that reflect poorly on LibreOffice. Again, the attempt to equate this to Canonical is very unhelpful, although your parting shot is illuminating.

But on the other hand you are also saying, that it is getting harder and harder to install software (on properterian systems) without the app stores and more over you do not have any choise on Windows S or iOS, which is correct. From the vendors view it is even logical (earning money, keeping the system secure, etc. etc.).

So basical TDC is getting a monopoly on many system, hence the Cannoical example is really perfect.

I hope you understand that many in the community do not fear that these “decisions” were made in good faith or might be correct at the moment, but can lead to “bigger problems” in future (saying 10 or 20 years?).

Dennis

I still disagree. TDC is getting temporary agency to act on TDF’s behalf doing something TDF’s board recognises it is very poor at executing. TDF could pass that agency to another entity at short notice any time. In fact, if things became any more constrained I would not feel comfortable hiring staff to work on them.

Further, TDC is incorporating as a legal entity that has to act formally in the service of its community and has no shareholders so the motivation to create a post-trading surplus is absent. This is all nothing like Canonical where Mark was trying to prove he could create a profitable business in parallel with Ubuntu.

S.

Simon Phipps wrote:

Dennis wrote:
> So basical TDC is getting a monopoly on many system, hence the Cannoical
> example is really perfect.
>

I still disagree. TDC is getting temporary agency to act on TDF's behalf
doing something TDF's board recognises it is very poor at executing. TDF
could pass that agency to another entity at short notice any time.

I agree with Simon. The comparison does not hold. Provisions to make
sure TDC cannot permanently capture LibreOffice on app stores can
easily be put into the TM license.

Cheers, Thorsten