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!
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 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.