Ideas around TDF's future

I am training over a hundred new contributors per year.

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So fine business ! Need some better visibility in the french area.

Seeing Project as opposite of Product (and visa versa) not really fruitful exercise. The donā€™t exclude each other. However the notion behind might be valid. So might be more communication/expression issue, compared to purport

Anyhow I do like to explorer the vision a bit. LibreOffice ideally needs more ā€˜contributionsā€™ in the sense developer activity (fixing bugs, refactoring old code). However I still not see how focusing on the ā€˜projectā€™ suddenly bring new contributors. Iā€™m even heaving a hard time envision where those contributors can be found

A small off-topic addition to ā€˜productā€™. What the product called to product might change over time. Microsoft Windows was in the past a proto-typical product. You had to buy each new version of it at a steep price. Windows is today tending to a ā€˜platformā€™ direction. Even major upgrades are free. However pushed into whole eco-system with all sorts of cloud solution. Those cloud services are more and more the source of revenue. Same with console gaming. The consoles are sold at cost price (or below). Revenue is made from games and other services.

Also I struggle a bit organizations using large scale deployments should contribute. Deploying LibreOffice might not about valuing LibreOffice at all. To only picked LibreOffice to add some Office Suite to the deployment (free of charge) for convenience. In the same why Linux Distroā€™s bundle LibreOffice. So LibreOffice being deployed on 1000 machines, and actually being used by 2 or 3 people a day. That not enough to ā€˜contributeā€™ anything.

The world has also changed 10-15 years ago. An expensive, locally installed Office Suite isnā€™t the norm anymore. MS Office isnā€™t bound anymore by machine. Itā€™s user bound. A user can use the Office Suite at any place at any time without additional costs. It might be even possible to pay by use (in corporate setting; speculation). And and full blown word processes isnā€™t even necessary anymore. There plenty of text editors, who are ā€˜good enoughā€™ for majority of users most of time.

So blindly distributing an Office Suite across full corporate network without knowing if actually used is isnā€™t necessary anymore. Which was - in the past - an argument for deploying LibreOffice broadly, in my perception. If you tend to ā€˜coerceā€™ the to contribute, the simply bail out.

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HI @Telesto ,

That is right: LibreOffice is at best a commodity at this point, at worst it is obsolete in its current form for the mainstream.

For TDF, this means: Either the project will wither and die in obscurity ā€“ or it needs to find ways to become a platform again for development of features that both individuals and entities are willing to invest their time or their employees time. In other words: TDF needs to identify which solutions will make individuals and entities excited and willing to contribute again and coordinate healthy coopetition around those topics.

Note that will NOT be found by asking the shrinking number of 0.3% in your example deployment that are still using LibreOffice as a product daily. The mission of TDF is also broad enough to not be limited to those use cases.

But to keep the project sustainable, it is not about ā€œbuilding something that someone would use if made available free of chargeā€, but instead ā€œbuilding something that someone is willing to contribute to making betterā€. The latter is asking from people and entities to invest something that is more valuable than money: time. History shows that is still possible with a clear goal, vision and shared understanding of a mission.

Best Regards, Bjoern

Hi @Sweetshark,

It is true that office suites became ā€œcommoditiesā€ several years ago but I guess not everywhere.
There are many countries in which connectivity and fast PCs arenā€™t that available and thanks to the work of TDFā€™s developers with experience in the field, companies and volunteers LibreOffice could help, literally, billions of them in their own native language.

We surely could work on that. There have been suggestions about Cloud and mobile to make LibreOffice more relevant, where good connectivity and having powerful PCs are not an issue, and modern but it has been seen as ā€œproblematicā€ by some.

Do you have any other ideas?

Ciao

Paolo

Obsolete according to whom? LO is not obsolete for my personal use. Itā€™s not obsolete for millions of other people around the world either.

If you mean that various cloud/SaaS solutions are replacing desktop office suites in the enterprise market, yes, thatā€™s been happening for some time now. But nowhere in TDFā€™s statutes nor the Next Decade Manifesto does it say that LO needs to take over the enterprise market.

The project is dying in obscurity? I havenā€™t checked the numbers, but as far as I can tell there is a more or less steady level of contributions from both individuals and companies.

But if the contribution levels were to drop in the future, Iā€™m not sure how discontinuing the desktop suite with no replacement from TDF is supposed to help increase contributions?

Hi @PaoloVecchi,

So, ā€œcloudā€ or more broadly ā€œcollaborative editingā€ is an obvious starting point as that is what LibreOffice mostly got replaced with. I dont think the topic is ā€œproblematicā€ per se, but rather that the attempts TDF did there recently were focused on providing a product for users while ignoring being a platform for contributors. That will obviously fail, as you can only reach users through and with contributors, not by bypassing or replacing them.

Other ideas: Some weaker ones ā€“ I still think LibreOffice could integrate better with other open source tools for content creation beyond classical productivity (e.g. Blender, Godot, Gimp, Inkscape, d3.js). But that is an weaker preposition.

The key though is not so much the topic ā€“ but the execution.

Best Regards, Bjoern

See here:

The Foundationā€™s goals are:

  • Manage the facilities on blender.org for users and developers who want to contribute to Blender.
  • Maintain and improve the current Blender product via a public accessible source code system under the GNU General Public License.
  • Establish funding or revenue mechanisms that serve the foundationā€™s goals and cover the foundationā€™s expenses.
  • Provide individual artists and small teams with a complete, free and open source 3D creation pipeline

As you can see, the Blender Foundation rightly recognises both Blender-the-project and Blender-the-product. AFAIK the Blender-the-product has always been available free of charge.

My impression is that Blender has also always been managed in a more centralised manner compared to most FOSS projects. Most of the paid developers working on it appear to be employed by the Foundation or its subsidiaries. There are roadmaps and strategies, and fundraising in order to make them reality. This is a different way of working compared to TDF, where until recently development was completely decentralised, bazaar-style.

If TDF were to become more like Blender Foundation, that would mean:

  • Hiring more in-house developers, avoiding relying on entities outside the Foundation for core development
  • Marketing LO boldly as a product for end-users, not primarily as a community of software developers or a set of building blocks for building enterprise software
  • Making roadmaps for improving LO in specific use cases and industries
  • Encouraging an ecosystem of companies providing training, services and assets, even if they donā€™t contribute code

IMO Blender Foundation has been very successful with this approach. Whether this would work for LO is another question, though.

Hi @tjhietala ,

Yes, and the ā€œenterprise marketā€ is the last market where this has been happening. Already when LibreOffice started, there was no serious investment in end user desktop productivity anymore and the market for buying a productivity suite off the shelf was essentially dead.

Maybe you should.

Note that given all of TDFs running cash flow is going into staff, this has to mean firing non-developer staff. (Also note that blender still invests ~20% of their development budget in tenders and not only in-house.)
Im writing this just so that you are clear on what you are asking here implies in a world where TDF does not have unlimited resources: TDF cant spend more than its cash flow, thus money for more developer staff has to be freed somewhere else.

Nah, not at all. Just because you dont see Blender marketing targeting beyond end users doesnt mean that it isnt there. And given the investments/donations by Microsoft, Epic, Steam and others it either has to be substancial or very, very effective.

Yes. Or at least have some product management and focus. Especially for how staff spends their worktime ā€“ as that is the one and only remaining resource TDF can direct with a roadmap now.

I think LibreOffice companies mostly do as good as they can here. However, the ā€œeverything LibreOffice needs to be gratisā€ mentality and mindset severely hurt them and make it unsustainable for many.

Best Regards, Bjoern

So, ā€œcloudā€ or more broadly ā€œcollaborative editingā€ is an obvious starting point as that is what LibreOffice mostly got replaced with.

Ideally LibreOffice needs some solutions that allow collaboration without the high degree of centralisation that comes from ā€œcloudā€ (and the associated complexity, processing capacity and bandwidth all of which put deploying things like Collabora Office beyond the means of most users). That might be at the level of federation, or even using peer-to-peer connections over IP v6. This is a topic that seems unlikely to get commercial contributors interested but could get high involvement from the same people advancing ActivityPub. It would be great for TDF to spend some money exploring this.

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4 posts were split to a new topic: Thoughts about other products

Hello all!

Regis,

Thanks a lot for your email.

I participated in the Board Meeting on Monday 07/08 and expressed my great concern with so many emails, so much wasted energy and so many urgent and important things stopped.

Iā€™ve been on the board once and Iā€™ve never seen such slowness to solve the project matters.

I will make your words mine and add: give us back the foundation that we elect, believe and love, with imagination, action and kindnessā€¦

Best,
Eliane Domingos
Brazilian LibreOffice Community

Hi @elianedomingos,

thank you for participating to the BoD meeting on Monday as this is exactly what the board needs.

If the board does not see members of staff and members of the board of trustees engaging for what they believe and what they want then decisions, that you might not like, will be taken on your behalf.

In my opinion board members need to be supported or seriously told off by members of staff/trustees for what they are doing as itā€™s, individually and collectively, our responsibility to further TDFā€™s missions and goals.

Please do continue to come to BoD meetings, write on this forum and invite many others of your community to do the same as you must make your voices heard so that things can be improved for all of us.

Ciao

Paolo

Hello Paolo,
Thanks!

As I said during the meeting. I believe in the project since it saw the light, back in 2009.

We need to work together. We cannot fight as enemies.

I want respect with all the people who trust and love this project. I want transparency as we had in the past.

Iā€™m tired of these conflicts.

As I said, there are a lot of emails, time is wasted on fallacies.

Here in Brazil we have a say, ā€œwho talks a lot, do nothingā€.

So, less emails and more action. Letā€™s move on.

Best,
Eliane Domingos
Brazilian LibreOffice Community

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Hi @regisperdreau @elianedomingos @PaoloVecchi thanks for your contributions to the discussion (or trying to keep them short :slight_smile: )
Think they fit more in this topic, so moved them.
Cheers,
Cor

I agree, itā€™s great that LO gives this opportunity to languages big or small, as long as there are translators. This is one reason TDF should keep releasing LO-the-product: we shouldnā€™t expect that for-profit companies operating under limited resources will support every language in the world. With LO, if you put in the effort to translate it, TDF will release it and thereafter anyone who speaks the language can use it.

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Hi @elianedomingos,

Rest assured that you are not the only one being tired of these conflicts.

Iā€™m also baffled to see that the majority of the board seems to be actively looking for conflicts and criticisms when it could be avoided.

Less emails would mean also less transparency.

Would it be OK for you if I see actions going in, what I believe to be, the wrong direction and just be silent about it?

I would prefer to share my concerns, as a member of the board of directors and as a member of the board of trustees, with the community so that you and others can participate in a more democratic process instead of accepting decisions from the top down.

Iā€™ve been sharing as much information as I could, lots canā€™t be shared yet, to allow you to evaluate the merits of board decisions especially when those decisions were, in my opinion, problematic. Iā€™ve been censored and got hit by retaliatory actions but at least I see that the community started participating more.

Please do continue to do so and make your voice heard.

Ciao

Paolo

Hello all,

Paolo,

My point is not less transparency. Transparency is what TDF needs more at the moment. My point is the excess of mails with no effective results.

Best,
Eliane Domingos
Brazilian LibreOffice Community

I support the initiative to maintain, and even increase, transparency at the decision making level. This entails a commitment on the part of BoD members to, in these few months remaining in this term, achieve concrete milestones (one step at the time) and foster an environment where members around the world feel comfortable participating in a project and not overwhelmed by an avalanche of messages that often lead to nothing.
#MoreTransparency

HI @iplaw67 , all, moderators,

Im sure the features of OnlyOffice are important, but IMHO they dont belong on #board-discuss, much less so in this thread discussing TDFs self perception and future.

Can that be split/moved elsewhere, please? Thanks.

Best Regards, Bjoern