With all the feedback received, I strongly propose to leave 7.0 without
tagging and finalize the plan for a later release.
I share Thorsten's view. While I've generally been a big proponent of
getting everything nailed down in one try, I would strongly prefer to
get a weaker solution "Community Edition" out which seems to be
collecting a weight of support against Personal. That support arriving
even before we had a clear write-up of the issues we want to solve.
Perhaps we can iterate it based on feedback, we at least generate some
hard data on its effectiveness.
I would also really like to avoid stalling effective improvements to
our website to encourage enterprises to support the project. The
improvements there to date have been really small and incremental, and
as we now know ineffective.
I know there are concerns this would delay things
infinitely and nothing will happen,
Ultimately, we're getting press, and interest, and relevance, and
feedback from the community: integrating that into something better
while people are interested sounds good to me. I'm sure marketing can
turn that into a success story.
It is now widely known that the status-quo is working extraordinarily
poorly. Rather than accepting and extending that for six months - I'd
prefer to use the momentum to encourage at least some improvement.
The name “Personal” excludes even small educational organizations, which
are a part as per slide 29. It also excludes small NGOs - thinking of
the local street worker office with two volunteers, or the youth care
...
but still, I think “Personal” sets the frame too strict.
...> Also, if we go to universities for the budgeted campus ambassador
program, with the above wording, even using in smaller working groups
...
I know the plan is to draw a line somewhere, but the above, at least for
a non-native speaker, feels quite narrow.
I really don't think we want to discourage contributing to LibreOffice.
That's why it's important we get our marketing right.
However carving out Education, Universities, NGOs, youth care - as
markets which should not support the project financially is really
unhelpful.
It is hard to predict the future, and the best predictions are sold to
people rather than being free but checkout:
https://www.gminsights.com/industry-analysis/collaboration-software-market
This has a pretty pie-chart in it "Canada Collaboration Software Market
share by Application 2026":
https://www.gminsights.com/assets/img/collaboration-software-market-by-application.png
Education is approaching 25% of that.
In recent time, Education has been a bright point for actually
contributing to the ecosystem.
As one example - we can now build and run on iOS and tablets because of
a single education area in Switzerland - as well as a big chunk of
Adfinis and Collabora's investment. Perhaps a good thing we didn't tell
them that they don't have to contribute or get support.
Education sales has helped to fuel a similarly significant chunk of
C'bras development team via sales in lockdown.
It is quite unclear to me why some segments that pay for a premis,
heating, lighting, hardware, sysadmin time, network bandwidth,
deployment, a Windows OS 
and more should not be encouraged to
contribute to LibreOffice's growth.
For our friends, we can sooth their conscience and tell them that using
the Personal or Community version is just fine for them, and that we
contribute for them - or whatever =) that's easy to do personally
surely? That means we can help our friends and neighbours while not
killing the market for whole segments.
What we want to do is to very strongly encourage them, convince them,
make things clear to them, because the project can only survive if there
is sufficient funding, and the ecosystem is one of several key
parameters for the success of TDF - we wouldn't be where we are without
all of you, all of the community.
Thanks for those words.
I find it much easier to celebrate things with a positive message than
Problem is; this celebration party is great - but currently has nearly
zero attendees =) The hosts are tapping their watches and wondering if
they even bothered to send an invitation out =)
I would really like to see some messaging that we can show is effective.
TDF is no different in this regard! We ourselves, we use lots of free
software as an organization - be it for web, database, file services,
mail, chat, conferencing and other servers. We have the skills in-house
and we often rely on pre-compiled binaries from free software projects.
We do contribute back e.g. by supporting upstream development, doing
advocacy and working together on a common goal.
I think this is generally acceptable in the society of FLOSS projects
because we contribute very heavily ourselves.
We don't spend our time complaining about Nextcloud mailing the
sysadmins of larger users' to suggest paying for support though =) or
for Ubuntu having a 'Pricing' button on its front-page or ... Most
of these other projects are doing the hard (but much easier)
corporate-owned FLOSS project branding thing.
We show their brands rather regularly to our users - contributing at
least that value to them.
The brands we don't effectively show are from those of our ecosystem
that contribute to LibreOffice
In the end, I trust the marketing team, I trust the board, I trust the
community - and I’m sure our collective wisdom will bring up what is
best for the project.
That is a positive view.
ATB,
Michael.
