Developer hiring proposals

Hi Florian,

It would be really nice then if TDF worked constructively together with the COOL community to ensure that (as Paolo suggests):

Clearly having a win-win here is the ideal. I maintain that the current situation is a win-win, TDF funds itself from donations from LibreOffice, and Collabora funds itself from leads generated by Collabora Online - and in turn contributes heavily to LibreOffice. That seems sustainable; TDF is growing it’s income, as is Collabora.

You mention COVID19. If it happened today, people could easily deploy the un-limited CODE binaries we provide for free to as many users as they like, and TDF could fund it’s hosted solution for wider use. We can’t change the past - but the future can be better.

So - I’m struggling to see what problem we solve here. Then again - the proposal to hire online developers sounds great if they are going to work together with Collabora to improve COOL. A problem comes if TDF decides to pass off our work as theirs, using the brand we have built together - by building and promoting LibreOffice Online binaries. Some respondants seem to suggest this, but the benefits are under-explained.

So first thanks for clarifying like this, it is friendly when summarizing other people’s opinions / statements if you’re not sure what they mean! :slight_smile:

Let me unpack that here (and I’m not so concerned about mobile). One of the things missing in your praise of Open Source development was money: how do people in our community get paid to free their time to do what they love: working on FLOSS.

Donations and ‘leads’ for TDF and Collabora serve similar functions: to generate revenue to further the development of the software.

I hope we agree that if TDF removed donation requests from the software it would please a tiny number of people - but this would be paired with a massive negative financial impact. If this (unwise) thing was done - not getting money would eventually mean not being able to pay as many TDF staff.

Luckily this is a silly idea :slight_smile: so is rather unlikely to happen. But my hope is that stating basic economics facts - like income should be >= expenditure - is not seen as a threat to anyone - it is just common sense in budgeting.

Lets think about the case that TDF builds and ships its own binaries of Collabora’s code - using the brand the LibreOffice brand that the community including Collabora has invested in. I think that is the idea of some about this somewhat unclear proposal.

Then what happens in this case? without exceptional care this harms Collabora’s ‘lead’-flow (which is somewhat like ‘donations’). If that happens then -inevitably- in time this will cause our income from COOL to reduce, and in the same way that will result in hard decisions about us funding staff to work on LibreOffice.

That is just economics. Worse - we know from studies that donations are far less effective a source of income than product sales - so this would not be moving money from Collabora to TDF but loosing it.

Let me put some numbers on the risk: we have 35+ people committing to online from Collabora in the past year, and an overlapping set of 40+ people committing to core in that time. The ongoing cost of our huge contribution of time & expert resource here is some multiple of TDF’s annual income - so it is not easy to see how to replace that, certainly not with two people or even seven.

As such - a small investment can do significant damage, this is particularly magnified as TDF is the steward of the LibreOffice brand which we have built and promoted together. It would be sad to see that used to harm a major contributor to the wider community.

TDF is very welcome to fund people to contribute to Collabora Online - why not?! we have a welcoming community. I’m pleased to see TDF spending its money on hiring developers. But - I would encourage TDF to spend the money wisely; not to take our work and distribute it in a way that could harm LibreOffice - by reducing its revenue and hence developer base.

There is of course a lot more to say, this is a complex area. I’m used to people ignoring the issue, hand-waving it away, or claiming it is not TDF’s problem - but none of that changes the reality I see. We need to keep a win-win here, and work together - for the good of Open Source Office productivity.

Best regards,

Michael.

‘by reducing its revenue and, consequently, its developer base.’

I seriously believe that the opposite will be true!

Developing the Collabora market requires skills development, genuine
sharing, training, certification (including for junior developers),
university teaching, and continuing education.

In France, it has become very difficult to learn C++ with effective
training courses, and there is no training in Collabora and its
development.

There are many areas that you do not address; we are waiting for macro
control, the database connector, automation if necessary, and access to
artificial intelligence.

Are you following what is happening in France with ‘La Suite’… La Suite
is based on cutting-edge web technology (at least according to its
creators).

During the recent hackadays, 300 people gathered to think about the future
of the office suite.

Organise the same hackfest in France! We have never strong communication in
France to young people and universities.

They don’t talk about interoperability at all. ‘Docs’ and ‘Grist’ ignore
the OpenDocument format.

I believe you are more likely to lose your revenue and your developer base
by not promoting the sharing of skills. Outside of Collabora, where can
your developers find jobs ?

There may be competent people outside of Collabora who would like to
achieve things and promote the ecosystem.

We like to be Collabora ambassador but we need some extra-knowledge and
able to answer to all questions even we are not hired by Collabora.
bests,

Régis Perdreau

Hi Michael,

I’m not suggesting anything in relation to your company’s products.

As you know your former business partner (currently an employee?) and contractors decided that I have conflict of interests in relation to LibreOffice Online and by extension your product so do not imply that my statement has anything to do with it.

I suggested that you write to the board to see if a written mutually beneficial agreement could be found in relation to the negative impacts you are imagining.

From what I read it seems like the negative impacts you are imagining are the same you were imagining many years ago and probably you won’t change your mind for years to come.
At this point I don’t see the need of investing time in discussing an agreement that, as you seem to imply, would see a commercial organisation impose limitations on the mission and goals of a non for profit foundation as that, in my opinion, would be against laws and regulations.

Ah - sorry if that came across the wrong way; I really don’t think you are likely to harm TDF by suggesting we find a win-win here :slight_smile:

The only win-win solution I can see is for TDF to invest in developers in all areas for the benefit of everyone.

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Indeed. Perhaps the consolidation of the ecosystem makes sense business-wise in the short term, but going forward, who’s going to invest time and effort in learning the intricacies of a massive C++ codebase, if the whole global job market for those skills basically consists of one mid-sized company?

Actually, I think some people will, but probably not because they love the codebase as such. It’s because they know and use LibreOffice, support TDF’s mission and want to be part of a global community working towards a shared charitable goal. Turning LibreOffice into a some kind of abstract technology platform or source code repository that would preferrably never find its way to end-users’ hands, as some have suggested in recent years, would be counterproductive to not only TDF’s statutory mission, but the long-term prospects of the ecosystem, as well.

Now it seems wrt. LOOL, even the “abstract technology platform” approach, i.e. unfreezing (thawing?) the repository and hiring a couple of developers, is too much for Collabora. It’s not at all clear to me why it would decrease, rather than increase, the number of leads received by Collabora and the size of the developer base?

A meta-question about the LO Base proposal: MS Access gained popularity in an earlier age, where there were fewer and much less convenient alternatives for developing simple DB-based GUI applications. How sure are we, that at this point in time, we would not be investing in somewhat of a “museum piece”? What statistics do we have about the popularity of Access (i.e. use in practice, not the fact that it’s bundled in MS Office)? And what indications do we have regarding interest in using LO Base?

Also, what has been the ecosystem involvement with Base? Are there business/government clients of Collabora, Allotropia, (others?) which use it? Are there ecosystem developers who routinely work on Base?

(And just to clarify - I’m generally supportive in rounding this out, but since resource allocations are things we need to evaluate comparatively, this is relevant to the comparative significance)

Two points about the “Online and mobile” proposal:

The first point is that this is a proposal to hire 4 developers. Where is the budget for that? We have not had a massive, sustained, increase in revenue recently. Or - are you guys planning to basically
gut the tenders budget?

Second point:

If we were awash with money, enough for investing in everything, then maybe; and if we were not currently in an ongoing dispute with Collabora and Allotropia that we are trying to settle, then maybe. Otherwise, not really.

Hi Eyal,

Base is used as a complementary tool in the mail merge function, and in Calc as a database.

Cool doesn’t provide any similar tool.

It is therefore necessary to maintain and improve it a little.

That’s my point.

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Two points about the “Online and mobile” proposal:

The first point is that this is a proposal to hire 4 developers. Where is the budget for that? We have not had a massive, sustained, increase in revenue recently. Or - are you guys planning to basically
gut the tenders budget?

We have realistically one bidder, which already, in particular given the past history, is a significant issue. In addition, it seems that bidder would not want to bid under our procurement policy. I don’t see how tendering in 2025 could still be realistic.

Hi Eyal,

I can only speak from my personal experience as a business and domestic user of Base.

I’ve been using the various iterations of Base since StarOffice days. It has always lacked the polish of its main rival MS Access, and for those on macOS, Filemaker Pro, making sophisticated UI interaction a challenge well beyond the realms of what a common user might be comfortable with. Even the signifcant developer investment brought in by Sun with the Java embedded database of hsqldb 1.8 and the Pentaho report builder integration only relatively improved that experience. The fact remains that Base development has always been the unloved child of the LibreOffice project. Maintenance of the codebase has always seemed to play second fiddle to other modules, where changes made to Writer or Calc have been considered priority topics to the detriment of bugs that were then created in the Base codebase.

From recollection, when metrics were being taken of the use of LibreOffice, Base was specifically excluded. Why exactly that was the case, I don’t know. Perhaps there have been more recent metrics taken that do include Base statistics.

From an ecosystem partner point of view, it would appear that Base was considered for quite long time as a black hole that wasn’t worth the time and significant investment for any reasonable ROI in a decent timeframe. Yes, there was the embedded Firebird migration project, but that literally didn’t even make it halfway to being a replacement for the current and now somewhat ancient hsqldb embedded variant.

Additionally, it is of note that none of the online versions of LibreOffice of which I’m aware (and unless I’ve missed something), have any sort of Base component. This appears to have been a deliberate choice by the ecosystem partners.

With regard to MS Access, it is my understanding that it is not included in the default domestic subscription model of Microsoft 365 and that it is only available separately for Windows PC as a desktop application. This means that most domestic users are shut out from Access. An improved LO Base module would go a long way to opening up that area to people looking for a way to find the same thing without being platform restricted and having to pay separately for it. Similarly on Mac, FMPro is only available through payment of a fairly costly license fee.

It seems to be fairly difficult at the moment to find any multi-OS compatible database application or portable database solution that has a fairly easy to use UI. Either any such solutions require an embedded JVM (or corresponding JRE/JDK at corresponding system level), or else a complete Java application with the inherent limitations of the Swing UI, or else the proposed solutions are not multi-OS nor multi-arch.

Having a modern, functional Base module with a reporting engine not reliant on Java and multi-OS, multi-arch to boot, would go a long way to filling that need and helping to democratise the use of LibreOffice even further.

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Base is a front end for any relational database engine, not only for Access. In addition to internal use for mail merge, the application area of Base ranges from training courses using the integrated database to complex applications with external databases in a commercial environment. And the use of SQL is by no means outdated.

Only with a good Base component users will stop to misuse a spreadsheet as database.

I would really appreciate it if TDF hired a developer who would focus specifically on Base.

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I agree with Regina. Base is an important and distinctive feature of LibreOffice and it would benefit from thoughtful and innovative improvement by a skilled developer.

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It is useful to remind that early 2022 a new director suggested TDF to distribute full LibreOffice Online for free. That was of course in the believe that growing market by giving away the product for free would generate more income for the ecosystem and presumably Collabora was not willing to support that. Asked for examples from a comparable open source ecosystem showing that it would not harm the ecosystem doing the work on online (Collabora), the director promised to give those later. I haven’t yet seen them.

It is useful to remind that early 2022 a new director suggested TDF to distribute full LibreOffice Online for free.

Which is exactly in line with TDF‘s mission, goal and objectives. As a director, one needs to first and foremost have TDF‘s interest in mind, which this new director obviously did.

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There’s a few tools like Teable, Baserow, and Mathesar that take up this mantle but through web browsers. DBeaver on Linux also comes to mind, as does Kexi and DBGate (probably the most advanced in development).

I’m not against developing Base further, but just keep in mind there are lots of accessible FOSS solutions that are streets ahead of Base now.

I am curious how quickly one could improve Libreoffice code by loading it into an LLM and using Vibe-coding to improve the software. This will minimize onboarding time in the future and make it easier to replace the clearly self-interested and bitter Allotropia and Collabora for building business models that try to exploit and gatekeep a public good. I remember when Thb and Cors were on the board and they could barely contain their biases for their corporate interests. At least I respect Meeks’ transparency and intent for mutual benefit.

Just remember there’s always developers from emerging markets that will work double time for a fraction of the price and if you give them proper knowledge transfer (AI can help) then the output code ain’t half bad.

Hi y’all,

it’s quite hard to say how much potential Base has - simply because it’s been so far behind the other applications in the LibreOffice suite, for such a long time. So the argument that Base is ~unused, therefore any investment is useless - is circular IMO.

Those community members working with Base are IMO best placed to assess its potential:

and

Also assuming that usually, a TDF-funded developer would be able to spend a significant fraction of their time mentoring, and taking into account the existing volunteer Base developers in the project - this proposal appears to have a decent chance to kickstart & sustain a Base modernisation initiative.

Just my 2c, Thorsten

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It just means that we don’t do tendering, but engage in a different process, appropriate for the situation of a single service provider. The legal controls and the procedure might be different, but in itself, that is not a problem.

Of course, that is ignoring the bad blood and outstanding claims on both sides with Collabora & Allotropia, which are still not resolved.

It just means that we don’t do tendering, but engage in a different process, appropriate for the situation of a single service provider. The legal controls and the procedure might be different, but in itself, that is not a problem.

I seriously doubt awarding contracts to always the same company is compatible with the rules we are subject to, nor desirable - even if there was no past history.

We are a nonprofit foundation, not a business club.

It has been explained more than once that your reading of TDF’s mission is not the only one and especially not the one from the meaning of the German :wink: wording, that learns that ‘free’ is as in freedom, not free as in without payment.
Your words further more seem to suggest that you do not understand TDF’s mission to unite all stakeholders in a balanced way.

It is interesting to look the outcomes of the facilitated meetings we had in Bucharest. Do read what it says about Rebuilding trust and Charitable purposes/objectives.
(Give the situation still looks quite wrecked, one wonders how it could happen that some audit concluded that spending to work on improving the internal situation, should be considered as being not in TDF’s interest.)