Re: [tdf-discuss] Who is Funding LibO?

Marc Paré wrote:
> The LibO project is community driven, and its members are what makes it
> live.

Well, Marc, I got this point very well in yours and others' messages. :)

But I still see a lot of confusion in this list about the meaning of 
"Community" and "Foundation".

I'd like to add more details about this consideration of mine, in order 
to explain because I'm feeling uncomfortable by reading many messages in 
this list.

On 28th September, the day of TDF announce, I was contacted from some 
people who were interested in OOo ***vitality*** because they were 
supporting or advocating migrations to our office suite in my area.

They were scared from the possibility that Oracle dropped OOo support 
and the product was simply *dead* because of lack of support from 
whatever *credible* organization.

There were few news, so I contacted other people in the Italian OOo 
Community (among them, Italo Vignoli and Andrea Pescetti) for more info.

Summing up what they wrote back, I've decided to reply to those people: 
"as long as Oracle supports OpenOffice.org as an open source project and 
any other initiative is not clear, please support the main 
OpenOffice.org product and the scheduled migration to that product".

Somebody agreed, somebody else stopped the whole migration. ;'(

Among those who stopped, there are people who perfectly understand how 
free software works, but they need to know "who is doing what" in a project.

In a nutshell: being sure of a sustainable development or, at least, 
being sure of a entity that takes care of making that development become 
sustainable in the future.

I suppose this was the main concern of Harold Fuchs too.

A Foundation that collects funds and gathers contributions to further 
developing LibO, and steers the wider Community for that development, 
it's a reassuring idea. It's just like Mozilla.

A Community project, whose members can or cannot provide those funds or 
contributions, since they haven't a duty to do so, it's, well, just 
scaring for whoever is thinking to do a migration to "something" based 
on OOo code or to suggest people for that migration.

BTW, I really like the idea of a Foundation, and I always liked it. 
Instead, I like a lot less the idea of a "Community project", with or 
without a TDF "association" in it.

I hope you understand what my point is, here.
--
Gianluca Turconi

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