Budget 2025 planning

If if has been the case that we had a maximum of two bidders for tenders, it was a broken process to begin with. It could not have been effectively competitive, there was too much potential for collusion, even without the presence of employees, owners and officers of the companies within TDF institutions.

And if that’s the case, then that proposal of mine is only relevant if we believe we have any realistic expectation of getting other bidders.

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HI y’all,

That is not true. For as far as I remember, even during the first tenders TDF ran, all TDF staff reported to @floeff - not to any individual directors, or even the entire board. That firewalling was setup IIRC during the 2nd board term of TDF, and resulted in shielded, private places for the team (mailing list, matrix channel etc) that the board (nor anybody else) never had access to. Annual reviews & compensation discussions were also handled by @floeff - to prevent that from being used as a lever.

Hello,

If if has been the case that we had a maximum of two bidders for tenders, it was a broken process to begin with. It could not have been effectively competitive, there was too much potential for collusion, even without the presence of employees, owners and officers of the companies within TDF institutions.

You are getting to the ground of the problems. We had about 800.000 € in tenders planned for one year (about half existing projects from the past, about half newly built). Statistically, we had about one tender every one and a half weeks and not even the staff to deal with such a huge amount.

Only very rarely we had bids that were not from the two companies represented in the board at that time. You even see this in some of the votes published here around 2021/2022, subject is like „award tender XYZ to ABC“. Probably between 5% and 10% of bids maybe, from what I remember, were from others. As such, if a tender was awarded, most of the time it was awarded to one of those companies.

The companies had a partnership agreement on some matters, and from some time on, it was disclosed there was some financing of development too, the exact wording is in the board minutes, I don’t recall it from the top of my head.

And in addition, at least some of those later tender contracts provided by the companies were problematic as well.

And if that’s the case, then that proposal of mine is only relevant if we believe we have any realistic expectation of getting other bidders.

Right now, the amount of potential bidders has just become smaller, not larger, so I am not overly optimistic at this time… this is clearly something to work on.

That is not true. For as far as I remember, even during the first tenders TDF ran, all TDF staff reported to @floeff - not to any individual directors, or even the entire board. That firewalling was setup IIRC during the 2nd board term of TDF, and resulted in shielded, private places for the team (mailing list, matrix channel etc) that the board (nor anybody else) never had access to. Annual reviews & compensation discussions were also handled by @floeff - to prevent that from being used as a lever.

Staff matters were also discussed with me in „one on one calls“, staffed by the conflicted directors.

It shields the team if things get routed through me. It doesn’t shield me, and in particular, it doesn’t shield the process at all.

Of course more bidders is better. According to Winheller, it is not per see an issue if there is one bidder when tenders are public.

Of course more bidders is better. According to Winheller, it is not per
see an issue if there is one bidder when tenders are public.

It is quite pointless to work on a tendering policy and spend lots of
work and time to write and assess tenders, when the realistic
expectation is that there is always only one bidder, and as such only
one winner, and therefore zero comparison with other offers.

It adds quite some costs and administrative burden, probably on either
side, for essentially no advantage in return.

Hi @floeff ,

whether the process needed improvements is beside my point (in fact, the legal analysis concluded it did need extra shielding, which the new policies included) - but I would appreciate it if you would refrain from exaggerations or outright falsehoods in a discussion such as this one. For the tenders that I participated in, it was AFAIK always either a group of independent volunteer experts, or staff members and not you, who did the technical and commercial evaluations.

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Hi @floeff ,

Perhaps. Then again in 2022 when we started this, the landscape was a different one (there were even TDF project goals to expand the ecosystem). Sadly of course, since more than 3 years not a single tender in that area was issued, so it’s not a surprise there’s now no thriving ecosystem of companies for TDF tenders.

In my personal opinion, the current (still draft?) tender policy is also fundamentally un-workable. I would not bid for any tender under that policy, and would strongly advise in particular single entrepeneurs / small companies to very carefully assess whether it’s worth the risk. Effectively, TDF has managed to sterilize that market.

Yeah I guess, see above. Then again, with the current setup (board & ecosystem), is there a reason not to treat development work similarly to other areas (design stuff and BZ comes to mind), and go with a lightweight process now?

Best, Thorsten

I don’t think it’s feasible that TDF could now just directly award contracts to the unique company left in the ecosystem, in the current problematic situation. We need higher standards and more competition, not less.

A quick summary of what was discussed yesterday:

We’ll factor in individual event requests, like LibreOffice Roadshow or LATAM conference, into the marketing and community budgets. They will contain 30.000,00 € respectively 25.000,00 €.

Pre-2025 projects that will be kept:

  • MC request: Improvements on the Membership Committee tooling (10.908,54 €)
  • 2-4% budget to FLOSS software as devprojects or support (lowered to 5.000,00 €)
  • BZ release funding (5.967,77 €)
  • [REDACTED] trademark filing (5.000,00 €)
  • LibreTranslate Improvement of localizations and translations for worldwide involvement of volunteers (5.000 €)
  • Outreachy (35.000 €)
  • Graphic design work for great visuals for website, socials, blog posts and marketing (25.000 €, recently confirmed again on board-discuss)
  • LibreOffice SBOM (Software Bill of Materials) – CRA conformance (price TBD)

Pre-2025 projects that will be dissolved:

  • MC request: TDF welcome kit for the members → open for many years, unlikely to happen in 2025
  • Update & translate LibreLogo manual, complete LibreLogo unit tests → open for many years, unlikely to happen in 2025
  • [MC] Carbon compensation → open for many years, unlikely to happen in 2025
  • 10% project budget for members → if there is a need we will fund it individually, but hard to come up with a concrete demand and therefore sum for worldwide shipping, customs etc.
  • Hardware for members → if there is a need we will fund it individually, but hard to come up with a concrete demand and therefore sum for worldwide shipping, customs etc.
  • [MC] Training on the reform of foundation law changes incl. BoD → important, but unlikely we have a chance to find a suitable slot in 2025 that is not during LibOCon
  • Research and development of collaborative editing features based on open standards
  • In-person strategy workshop 2024-2026 → important, but unlikely we have a chance to find a suitable slot in 2025 that is not during LibOCon
  • Legal consultations → overspent, so will be dissolved and we spent as needed, hard to forecast
  • Integrating Hetzner cloud to Jenkins
  • Bug Bounty Program → unlikely to happen in 2025
  • Aptos font replacement → unlikely to happen in 2025

New projects proposed for 2025 and beyond:

  • [REDACTED: trademark registration] (1.149,54 €)
  • Claim on [REDACTED: third-party domain name] (6.009,50 €)
  • Developer for User Interface and macOS
  • Developer for Python
  • Developer for Online and Mobile
  • Developer for Base

In particular given the new ecosystem situation and the feedback received, currently there are no tenders in the budget.

Above is the status of the discussion and close to final, but not finally approved yet.

Related to the budget, but not changing it: the Certification Committee could use the Membership Committee tool to manage certification renewals, new certifications, and certification expirations. I think we could just install a second instance, and use it without modifications, as the task is simpler, and the tool would help in keeping track of renewals in a straightforward way (today they are manually managed with a Calc spreadsheet, and although we have made the process easier by grouping renewals it is still a nightmare).

Hi Italo,

I looked at Professional Support | LibreOffice - Free and private office suite - Based on OpenOffice - Compatible with Microsoft and find only a realatively small number of people which are listed as certified members there.
Are this all certified members or are some of those not listed on that website?

Regards,
Andreas

Cor, don’t be ridiculous. One bidder means that there is no tender. It means a wholly different process, vis-a-vis the public and the trustees; and other regulation, legal precedent and possibly legislation applying. And, arguably, there can’t really be tendering with just two potential bidders.

(That does not mean the TDF could not have contracts for doing development work with Collabora.)

Given the clarification, you should probably drop the phrase saying that company owners were the direct managers of TDF employees other than yourself, as that statement is quite a serious accusation.

There were several voices requesting a Mac developer as well, including me.

Given the clarification, you should probably drop the phrase saying that company owners were the direct managers of TDF employees other than yourself, as that statement is quite a serious accusation.

The rules of procedure listed also company owners as responsible for staff oversight. Staff matters were discussed with them, often before they were discussed with the full board. That makes them explicitly responsible for staff, in comparison to other board members who did not held that oversight role.

There were several voices requesting a Mac developer as well, including me.

That‘s the line item with user interface and macOS. It is based on the recommendation Patrick Luby gave us: ‚Fortunately, I don’t think finding a “macOS expert” is what you need.‘

We can rephrase it, of course.

Thanks, that would help as I read that as a UI developer.

I’m not happythat decisions on this scale are made with 6 days’ notice since the RFC about them. I’ll also note that the Florian’s summary suggests that my suggestions did not even come up (?)

But - I’ll try to hang on to the last italicized sentence and pretend nothing is decided in any way.

So, in the mean time, let me comment on the “projects from the past” and “new projects” which Florian listed.

0. Developer hirings; “Developer for” UI, MacOS, Python, Base, Online, Mobile

Moved this up. We were talking about disbursing a pile of money, not a long-term budgetary commitment - right? So, how do these suggestions fit with that principle? Are you planning on hiring people for a pre-determined amount of time, or in permanent positions?

Anyway, I am against taking such a decision without a longer discussion - involving trustees and developers - about such potential positions. Bake it before you serve it up.

If it’s fixed-term employment, then - I think perhaps a very concrete possibility is hiring someone to work on tabbed UI and the other UI modes, perhaps even resulting in a more generally-usable customizable-ribbon-like UI library. But of course, this too is a half-baked idea.

I’ll also mention I have no idea why we need a “Python developer”. Is that a developer for improving Python support for writing macros/extensions? Or a developer to work on LO code that’s in Python?

1. The P2P LibreOffice project

Simon’s idea got a blog post and also a positive discussion thread here on discourse and also ). Is this the item named “Research and development of collaborative editing features based on open standards”? That’s really underselling it. This is a great idea and a chance to 1-up other office suite providers.

2. MC request: Improvements on the Membership Committee tooling; MC request: TDF welcome kit for the members

I’d probably support this, but - why haven’t we seen the request anywhere? If this has been sent to the BoD only and not disclosed to us, this is yet another violation of the statutory obligation to conduct TDF affairs transparently.

3. 2-4% budget to FLOSS software as devprojects or support

2-4% out of what? The regular expenses? The annual budget? The amount of money we have left?

Anyway, if this is considered, I expect the choice of projects, and the writing of rules for making the choice, not to be carried out by the BoD, as it has proven itself incapable of managing such duties fairly and without strong bias.

4. Update & translate LibreLogo manual, complete LibreLogo unit tests

I remember this is a plugin that Laszlo wrote, right? But - I don’t see why TDF funds should be spent on this.

5. [MC] Carbon compensation; Hardware for members; LibreTranslate Improvement; Integrating Hetzner cloud to Jenkins; JA community; five tenders plus costs for external experts; two legal items; two HR items; LibreOffice Roadshow

What do these mean?

6. 10% project budget for members

You mean, 10% of the sum gets decided not by the BoD, but by a decision of the trustees in general? I’m in favor. The thing is, it’s not a project, it’s a meta-suggestion. Also, I’d increase it to a lot more of the sum we have now.

7. BugZilla release funding

Generally support this, but - I would like to see the report on how our previous tranche of funding was put to use. Did we get any reporting about the use of our funds?

8. [MC] Training on the reform of foundation law changes incl. BoD

I believe this is subsubmed by my wider suggestion regarding making information available and accessible about our German legal environment.

I will say that it should not be assumed that this needs to happen in-person-only.

9. trademark filings

Asking informatively: Why would it be useful for us to file for trademarks? And if it would, why have we not done so yet?

10. In-person strategy workshop 2024-2026

For whom? And what kind of strategy? Anyway, given the state of affairs at the TDF I’m not sure this would work out so well.

11. Outreachy

What about it? Do we pay “per capita” there somehow?

12. Graphic design work for great visuals for website, socials, blog posts and marketing

We just funded that…

13. Bug Bounty Program

Is this realistic? That is, is there a significant number people who know LO well enough to pursue these bounties, but can’t be bothered to do LO work without the monetary incentive?

14. Aptos font replacement

Have we really even put Carlito and Caladea to use in LibreOffice at all? I mean, I’d like a metrically-compatible font, but I can’t say in fairness that it’s not just throwing money away. Moreover, we can just make non-free fonts available anyway, legally. This has been discussed as bug 159950.

15. SBOM

I vaguely remember a talk about this, but I’m not sure if it was in an LOCon or else. Anyway, why would this cost us any significant amount of money? Is this different than, basically, the list of our build dependencies?

16. Extensions for local/remote access of Open Source LLMs/SLMs

I’m not convinced we should be encouraging this stuff in the first place.

17. LATAM Conference, LibreOffice Asia Conference

You mean, funding a conference which would otherwise not happen? Or contributing funding to a conference that would happen anyway?

At any rate, I always feel that it’s not quite fair that the annual conference is always in Europe. I realize I might not be able to attend an annual LibOCon in LATAM, and funding for people to travel there from EMEA is not very realistic, but still. Let’s say

18. TDF hosted open source LLM

I don’t think so.

Some topics are excellent for a workshop…