Developer hiring proposals

I do not understand this and the following posts. The community is asking for TDF devs since basically a decade and working in special areas and resolving long time issues. Now, finally, the foundation got the OK by some layers and having the will to do it.

Outsourcing is always including other time consuming tasks. And a tender might not even faster nor cheaper.

typo ? :thinking:

crucial point indeed.
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/2025-June/093406.html

It’s not like hiring and managing developers is some kind of final frontier where no non-profit has gone before. That was a bad argument to begin with and has since been demonstrated as false by TDF successfully hiring and managing developers.

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Hi Regis,

I think your concern about skills:

Is an excellent one for TDF to address inside its education mission. I was rather disappointed to not see the funding of quality structural and developer documentation for the LibreOffice code included in the budget. That would seem something transparently educational, and extremely valuable for getting new developers started in our community. I commend it once again as an approach to the board, an idea that can accelerate development without dividing us.

There are some (inexplicable) concerns aired around the place about how hard it is to find and contract software development consultants for TDF: that seems beyond overblown - the world is full of them. However good technical / design manuals for the code would help make all new developers volunteer or paid more effective.

I am following La Suite with interest of course. There are a large number of etherpad successors with varying UX polish in the world. Docs was initially described as “the collaborative note-taking solution that lets you focus on your content”. Grist seems to be more of an airtable-like database visualization as a spreadsheet. I’m fairly convinced that they are not targetting becoming full-featured, interoperable office productivity tools anytime soon: instead they focus on different market segments.

With the benefit of a decade+ of experience selling FLOSS subscriptions, it is hard for me to imagine how that could be so. Currently Collabora uses a model similar to say Nextcloud - whereby the brand for the community project: CODE is the same as the paid product COOL - and we up-sell subscriptions. I would commend Bob Young (a RedHat founder)'s quote in our FAQ from when the COOL developers moved here: FAQ | Collabora Online - Community Page

In a model where the community version is presented as free of price, with a different brand, and with no effective way to understand that people investing the Euro millions to make it great are not in fact those who own the shiny brand - this seems to me extremely likely to cause the economic harms I have predicted. Doing that would exploit a core weakness of FLOSS vs. proprietary software that people who can build the binaries are assumed to be the creators and maintainers.

With respect I stand by my assertion that a plan to bring to market a LibreOffice branded Online would be excessively risky for the economics of half of the code contributions to LibreOffice. From the replies here - that seems to be the plan, and without any mitigations this will inevitably threaten our ability to fund LibreOffice developers.

Regards,

Michael.

Thanks Dennis. I agree, and I support hiring developers on specific tasks. I was pleased that the previous board finally managed to vote through Jonathan and Michael Weghorn’s positions. They have been doing great work. Hiring smart-people to work for TDF on specific things seems like a good idea in principle and practice as I’ve said many times.

They should however work on things that are not already being done, and not funded elsewhere. First for reasons of prudent use of donor funds, and secondly to avoid the appearance of divisive competition that can destroy value for TDF (as discussed elsewhere in the thread). As said many times before I believe new staff should also strengthen TDF’s charitable, educational mission by curating easy-hacks, mentoring newbies, and encouraging the growth of the volunteer base around LibreOffice in their specific area, which also acts as a force multiplier.

We know what things are not being worked on already: the Mac port, Base, and no doubt many other areas (eg. writing deeply technical code & structural documentation as a force-multiplier).

Eyal is spot on re: sustainability concerns. If TDF chooses to hire more staff than it can sustainably fund, it should be transparent with applicants that these are not permanent positions. Then again TDF has an extreme level of financial reserves which helps here I think.

Beyond the common-sense bits - I also want to kill the idea that TDF is, or has been a major source of funding for Collabora; it has not. Going forward Collabora wants to continue building a business that contributes to LibreOffice and COOL, but has minimal dependency on the complicated, troubling and changeable volunteer politics of TDF.

Regards,

Michael.

I think you’re again comparing pears and apples. Your selling a product and your developers are paid also out of that. That you reversed the development to TDF doesn’t make your developments for free, they already have been paid by your clients.

Also, I wonder what is the value you estimate from what you take from the community? say for example what is the value of the 54178 strings we translate in the UI vs 1499 for CODE. Or the 57256 strings of documentation vs 0 for CODE. It’s just a small example, not speaking about the rest of what the community offers.

As long as you will consider TDF and the majority of its community as a concurrent, you will not be able to see the value it can bring to your brand. Because you always seem to consider what you bring but not what you take.

And I’m not fighting for a online version as I have already said, but the way you position yourself in front of TDF is a dividing one and I don’t find it safe neither for the ecosystem nor for TDF.

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Typo! Lawyers of course.

The idea that a nonprofit can compete with a commercial company sounds strange to me. They are about different things. It feels to me like saying that doctors without borders can compete with private health clinics, or that a food bank can compete with a restaurant.

Nonprofit Linux distributions also use kernel code that commercial Linux distributors write, but I didn’t hear mentions of problems with gratis binaries in this context.

To me it would feel wrong to base an open source business model on what I would call artificial scarcity.

Did anyone assume TDF would be the major source of funding for Collabora?

Probably the budget from some years ago that had 800.000 € in tenders that were likely to be awarded to very few companies created some confusion…

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I would love to see TDF working with schools and universities on LibreOffice Online. Just like the desktop version, they could be on the consumer/user end, as well as on the contributor end.

The same for other nonprofits. Imagine we had an international organization, e.g. from the area of crisis management, doing something good for society and mankind, which uses LibreOffice Online and contributes to it. That would be a service to society, and a fantastic story to tell.

It’s true that the community, or different parts thereof, has been asking for funding developers. But we are an organization which runs within a budget. Our current state of “glut” of reserves masks that a little, but employment is a many-year affair, both for us in terms of community expectation and reliance, and also for the people who get employed. I’ve been on the executive board of one (and a half) NGOs with a relatively tight budget plus a few employees, and I remember that increasing permanent staffing (as opposed to a limited-term project) is a major decision; and it is never considered or discussed without the “prospective annual budget without” and “prospective annual budget with”. In our case, I remember that our annual income is not dramatically different now than it was, say, last year or a few years back; and - we have hired @jclark and @michaelweghorn recently (focusing on RTL/CTL/CJK and accessibility respectively). Additional hires can only come by reducing other expenditure, and the main “soft” expenditure we have is our budget for contracting work out (so far, via tenders) and funding various projects. So it’s not just the question of whether it’s a good idea to spend money on hiring developers, but whether it’s sufficiently beneficial as to take away the budget we currently use differently.

Some believe, that because we’ve had trouble with tendering and because of the Collabora/Allotropis purchase or merger, we can’t contract work out. That is certainly not the case; but those who believe it to be true see our budget as having a huge “increase reserves” item, which they may want to get rid of, as a foundation is expected to spend its donations, not hoard them. And this is how I see the large slate of developer positions being proposed.

Hi Michael,

We do know you were pleased that your member of staff, contractor and business partner present in the board discarded the previous finished proposal to replace it with one that illegitimately limited what developers could do to satisfy your desires.

Maybe @EyalRozenberg is not considering that other funding mechanisms are available for projects that will support the long term viability of the investment on new developers?

Your company, your subsidiary and one of your former contractors have benefited from these funding, eg:

https://nlnet.nl/project/LibreOfficeP2P/
https://nlnet.nl/project/LO-Accessible/
https://nlnet.nl/project/LO-Typography/
https://nlnet.nl/project/LibreOffice-CRDT/

It is very odd to see that while trying to block TDF from contributing and promoting LibreOffice OnLine, which allowed you to promote your own brand, you used in 2023 the LibreOffice OnLine logo to get funding for Collabora Online.

You killed LibreOffice Online in 2020 without warning while the board and the marketing team was still working on the marketing plan you wanted in exchange of allowing the community to have a usable LibreOffice Online so why did you decide to benefit from that logo to get funds in 2023?

Anyway, that was just an example of some funding mechanisms that could add to the funds available also to TDF to move forward with features, improvements and multi-platform developments.

Politics is something that has been introduced in the board by yourself, your business partner and contractor so if you plan to stop that also in public discussions then it would be great.

You made your point several times and all the times it seems like you do not recognise how problematic it is for you to state that TDF, a non for profit foundation under German laws, should limit its mission and goals so that they do not interfere with what you see as your own interests.

Finally we have a board where the politics and the toxic environment brought in by former directors is not present anymore. It would be great if we could keep it that way so that other organisations can see that there is a level playing field for everyone to contribute with business models that do not violate laws and regulations.

Ciao

Paolo

Hi,

100% agree.

But if you’re looking for feedback from the French community: we’re very skeptical about TDF’s ability to manage duplicate projects with reasonable success with 4 developers . Collabora has a development lead of many years, with many developers; is it realistic to compete with it?

Many believe it’s too late to reactivate Lool in 2025.

We want fewer bugs and mature features in existing products, not a duplicate project that will remain in beta forever. Collabora is free software and won’t disappear next month; there will always be time to develop our version if the licensing model doesn’t evolve ethically as TDF expects.

The environnement of Collabora is almost important, could you manage interaction with docker, kubernetes or other clusters, wopi integration ? You probably need a dedicated specialist to achieve that.

We are interested by these general enhancements :

  • Especially everything related to data insertion (JSON and RSS processing, calls to external OpenData APIs, pivot tables)
  • Integration with remote services (Nextcloud and others, AI is a plus)
  • Help pages that help you (significant progress, however)
  • Translated documentation (handled mainly by communities ?)
  • Tests on key features; it’s unacceptable to see versions with broken mail merge.
  • Easier contribution, UNO API documentation, IDL
  • Documented configuration files
  • Special attention to display, speed of processing large documents and tables without crashes during copy and paste.
  • A mobile app with a little more functionality; some people work on tablets.
  • Knowledge sharing with local communities .
  • Some templates and other file goodies.
  • OOxml enhanced compatibility
  • A roadmap !
  • (and I want to be able to replace line breaks with end of lines, sorry M Kagansky)
  • Also the LibreOffice P2P projects could be an interesting third way .

Bests,

Hi,

I propose a workshop at Libocon to study development scope with communities, if no other better proposition exists.

Bests,

The whole world benefited. Let me take this opportunity to put on record what an excellent job NlNet have been doing over many years for Open Source. This particular work in combination with NGI funding (from the EC) has built the foundations of LibreOfficeKit accessibility. All of that work is Open Source, much of it was contributed to the LibreOffice core. Better than that, this was strategic seed funding, that we and others have since invested a lot on top of to further extend, and improve LibreOfficeKit and Collabora Online accessibility hugely. So - thank you NlNet and the EC.

This continues your recurring pattern here of negative speculation presented as fact, as well as aggressive attacks around the trademark. I can confirm your statement is false. I would suggest attacking NlNet for their friendly attempt to promote LibreOffice with this logo (which was not included in “Improved accessibility for Collabora Online and LibreOffice” proposal) does not make a winsome start to seeking future funding from them. Collabora may appear to tolerate your ongoing baseless public attacks, but I would not assume this is true of everyone.

The LibreOffice trademark is valuable because of the collective work of very many individuals and organizations (including TDF) in the community. I expect that the good feeling people have for LibreOffice/TDF is based on their belief that it fairly represents that community and is stewarded in a reasonable and open way.

The move of the entire LibreOffice Online development team to work instead on Collabora Online was caused in large part by your aggressive approach, as well as the un-relenting refusal to listen to basic business / economic arguments. Sadly it seems all of the same hand-waving arguments are being re-deployed today.

Now there is continued proof by repeated assertion of non-competition in this thread. It seems in parallel to these assertions you are here suggesting that TDF is planning to enter the consultancy services market itself in return for grants. This is suggested to fill the ongoing funding shortfall for hiring new developers without matching donation income. It is of course an exciting idea to build a sales/grant pipeline and deliver consultancy - but the degree of commercial experience and business acumen needed (on top of having excellent technical engineers who can cope with the deadline pressures) should not be under-estimated.

Despite all that - today there is an extremely usable, easy to get, Collabora Online, based on LibreOffice we just did our COOL 25.04 release the code is all open source and I’d encourage people to check it out. We are grateful to all who have contributed to making it better in the community both in COOL and in the LibreOffice project: thank you all & NlNet / NGI.

As for the miscellaneous other serious accusations in your E-mail, it is safe to assume that my view is that they are also negative speculation presented as fact.

Michael.

I didn’t see anyone challenging this. This is not about NLnet. This is about which projects have received funds under the LibreOffice name and some other questions I’ve pointed out in my other email. Let me explain again with one example about what I find highly confusing:

This is an actual screenshot of the website with developer tools enabled. You see it shows the LibreOffice Online logo. The repository was frozen at the time of the project funding. Confusingly, the title talks about Collabora Online. And even more so, if I click on the LibreOffice Online logo, I am redirected to the Collabora Online website.

Would you be fine if we showed the Collabora Online logo and bring someone to a different website when they click on it? I guess not.

It remains a mystery to me what was funded using the LibreOffice Online name.

Again, this is not about NLnet. This is about who had projects funded under the LibreOffice name and some other questions I’ve pointed out in my other email.

Looking at a recorded board election townhall session from 2021, there seem to be different perceptions on the reasons. I hear something about GitHub in this recording…

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Hi Michael,

I haven’t attacked anyone, I’ve just presented facts that are there for all to see.

There is a LibreOffice OnLine logo, the mention of LibreOffice and a description that also states:

“The goal of this project is to implement improved accessibility for Collabora Online. The core of the proposal is to add accessibility to the edit view of documents, which are currently just pixels for a screen reader.”

Are the facts just a simple misunderstanding?

Did someone at NLNet, out of their own initiative, decided to get the LibreOffice OnLine logo and put it there despite the fact that it isn’t mentioned anywhere and the link points to your own project?

If it was a mistake then I should contact them, explain to them that no contributions from that funding went to the LibreOffice Online project and ask them to contact you to get the right logo.

Is then the project actually related to LibreOffice or only to Collabora Online?

The description seems to indicate that it’s only relevant to Collabora Online as the bit saying “are currently just pixels for a screen reader” doesn’t seem applicable to LibreOffice desktop.

Also the title states:

Private and accessible collaborative editing with Collabora Online/LibreOffice

As the feature has been funded also for LibreOffice, why I do not see any features related to “Private and accessible collaborative editing” in LibreOffice?

Or was also that text an initiative of someone at NLNet?

As we all value what NLNet did for many Open Source projects and if funds are available we should apply as well then it’s important for TDF to understand how the process works and who decides which logos and text to use.

It could turn out to be a mistake from their side, it happens, and they should fix that page but it could turn out that you did it all and that would be quite problematic.

We’ll ask and we’ll let everyone know.

Was LibreOffice OnLine, with written in all its files “This file is part of the LibreOffice project” and promoted using TDF’s trademarks and marketing team as well using TDF’s resources, a community project that should have been made available to all?

After having asked for clear answers for a while and not having received any satisfactory answer then it was my duty to clarify the situation.

I presented a motion to finalise what the name of the product and the actions from TDF were implying, that finally helped you in taking in consideration the questions of a deputy member of the board asking nothing more than clarity.

You agreed with the entire board to allow TDF to publish usable version of LibreOffice OnLine to the community in exchange of a proper marketing plan supporting “the ecosystem”.
The whole board and the marketing team got to work on it and then, without warning, you breached the agreement and forked the project. That’s the short and diplomatic story which at least clarified what LibreOffice OnLine was.

If you want to carry on attacking me for having performed my duties then we should share more board minutes and documents to clarify the situation once and for all.

Nope.

As any other Open Source projects TDF can and should seek fundings where available to increase its capacity to further its mission and goals including contributing directly to LibreOffice which in turn will allow TDF to have more skills to deal with mentoring and educational projects around the world.

I thought you would be very supportive of this initiative as it will help the project and increase TDF’s capacity to mentor and support even more developers around the world.

Ciao

Paolo