Hello Martin,
Answering to the discuss AT TDF list as I'm not subscribed to the
other ones...
Le Thu, 16 Jun 2011 18:39:54 +0200,
Martin Hollmichel <martin.hollmichel@googlemail.com> a écrit :
Hi Sam,
Do you have a concrete proposal?
yes, I have.
First, I do not have any problems with the Apache style of
decision making, lazy consensus sounds perfectly reasonable to
me. I like that style. This fits perfectly to the "meritocracy"
principle.
My understanding is, that this principle is based on
* contributing individuals
* organizations/institutions contributing developers and/or money
for the infrastructure/governance, these organizations contribute
because they have derived products or other business around the
regarding software. So users are represented in this model by own
work power or indirectly by companies.
This principle has been proven to work quite well for many open
source projects.
I think this principle may get enhanced by enabling a non profit
organization to have their own resources on a project (This might
fit into the Apache philosophy considering this organization as an
contributing institution). I think this is necessary because
there is already a lot of business happening around OpenOffice,
but most of these businesses are just to small or have not the
right expertise to execute on the "meritocracy" principle.
So what the OOo project missed most was to have a path to get
product feature or tasks done (or just 4th level support) with
the help of money offered.
So my proposal is continue project decisions the Apache Style but
also to find a framework to make product decisions in a manner
that also the concerns of Users, local communities, QA, business
partners, etc. get honored. This framework also should enable to
collect money so that development (committer) resources can be
found to get the issues addressed in an equitable process.
We already have thousands of feature requests and enhancements in
the queue, we are putting a new bunch of requirements on top of
it through the current transition to Apache, I think we should
seek the power of _all_ OOo communities, users and businesses to
achieve significant growth to make OOo a better and successful
product. And I did not even included wishes like ODF Viewers,
mobile and Cloud services around OOo.
My offer is to develop (with all concerned parties) a new charter
for all the groups mentioned above (as a successor of the
Community Council Charter) and enable the project to have own
development resources. The non profit organization Team
OpenOffice.org e.V. played in the past just the role of being the
cash box of the CC in a quite defensive way
(http://download.openoffice.org/contribute.html, will you find
the path to donate ??), now Team OOo is preparing to offer a link
between business, communities, users and developers to enable
growth on the new futile ground we are now moving on.
If I understand well your proposal concerns as well the LibreOffice
project. The principles you have outlined above are very much the
same ones the Document Foundation has been advocating and
implementing.
In this respect we would welcome working with Team OOo (and other
NGOs) You are also right to stress on the need to work on a charter
for all the NGOs,