I can provide correct information about LibreOffice/Collabora Online Typography project, and about the logo and your second point:
Unfortunately, the NLnet page of the project incorrectly lists my company. In this project, I, as an individual, received a donation to continue my development in code base of LibreOffice. (For my previous developments, see my TDF wiki page: User:Nemeth - The Document Foundation Wiki)
The NLnet project logo was designed by NLnet, rather look like a gift to LibreOffice and the wider free software community. So I did not design it, nor did I apply with it. I was surprised when I saw the logo, but I did not even think of doubting its good intentions, especially since NLnet, in my experience, is an excellent charity foundation to bring the free software community together, including LibreOffice developers. (At this year’s FOSDEM, I admired the hundreds of colorful hexagon stickers at the NLnet stand several times – mostly from a distance, because there were so many people there – including the ingenious standard stickers that make the NLnet or hexagon-compatible stickers freely implementable for everyone. I also encouraged our staff at the LibreOffice stand, suggesting that we also produce hexagon stickers, thereby strengthening our community. Marketing and community coordinator Mike Saunders liked the idea. Information: NLnet; Hexagons)
Its first external link is https://www.LibreOffice.org, the second is Collabora Online · GitHub, and the summary shows what important development goals NLnet has supported. (E.g. that Writer must break plain justified DOCX text in the same way as Word 2013 and later versions, rather than on multiple lines or even multiple pages.)
I am also involved in your second question. I gave NLnet as an example, as a recognized third-party organization that, if possible, could help restart the tendering process that has been stopped for too long, restoring trust and confidence, preventing our independent and meritocratic community from breaking up. I don’t remember much discussion about this, which may explain why it is not mentioned in the minutes.
I am glad if I managed to dispel some or all of your doubts!
Let me note that the most significant improvements to LibreOffice came from the two other winners, allotropia and Collabora Productivity, so I would like to thank NLnet in behalf of myself and participants for being able to support several of them!
If the “improved LibreOffice Online” was not funded why did you have the NLNet logo in your presentations of LOWA up to LibOCon 2022 and your talks about “LibreOffice P2P” are listed in the NLNet web site up to FOSDEM 2023?
The NLNet pages and your own slides keep showing that the “improved LibreOffice OnLine” was funded for more than 2 years.
That while you did not contribute to LibreOffice OnLine, you signed a partner agreement to sell COOL, you acted to kill LibreOffice OnLine, you even voted while in conflict of interests with LibreOffice OnLine and all of this without ever disclosing that you were funded to improve LibreOffice OnLIne while instead you were presenting LOWA/LibreOffice WASM as a project for the LibreOffice community.
It’s only by chance that I’ve noticed that your company got funded for 2 years to develop “LibreOffice P2P” to improve LibreOffice OnLine but LibreOffice OnLine never got any support or improvements so it seems like you kept the money rolling in only to fund your own product.
At the time I was pleased that you were working on an alternative way to have LibreOffice on the browser so that’s why I proposed to you, during board meeting, to officially present it to TDF and see if we could fund some of that work.
I guess you refused as the board would have had to do further checks and discovered that you were already misleading the board and the community by not disclosing you were being funded to improve LibreOffice OnLine but you had no intention of actually doing it as we can all see.
Everything could have been simpler and ethical if you informed NLNet in October 2020 that you could not fulfil the project description as LibreOffice OnLine was forked by your business partner but you choose not to.
You also choose not to tell NLNet to put your company logo and change the description to state that it was a project run by your own company to develop your own product based on LibreOffice. That would have been perfectly OK and you would have had all the rights to do what you wanted with it.
It would have been very easy, just look at this other example:
There is again the question of why since last year Collabora Productivity never got in touch with NLNet to tell them that they should not use the LibreOffice OnLine logo as they killed it by forking it and the Collabora Online logo should be used instead.
Apart from that the message is clearly stating that the funds will toward improving their own product Collabora Online, built on LibreOffice technology, without making any claims in relation to LibreOffice or LibreOffice OnLine.
At the end you chose to deceive everyone for your personal interests and, as it seemed to work well for you, you continued to do so while being the chairman of the board leading to create even more damages for TDF.
I’ll try to make it easier for you to understand my question:
is the code that you are writing going to result in features available to the users to have “Real-time collaboration between several, distributed LibreOffice instances”?
The description leads to many interpretations including one where you get funded to “re-architect LibreOffice Writer’s comment (and later on change tracking) implementation, to make use of a suitable CRDT data structure” and then you create your own product that benefits from those changes in LibreOffice but that LibreOffice users won’t ever see as the usable features are only in your product.
Seeing how much you have deceived and mislead people in the board and the community it would be great to know what the actual plan is.
The more you try to mislead people the more we can see confirmations of what I’ve stated making your position even worse.
We’ll contact NLNet to see what information the have to share and we’ll ask them to remove the LibreOffice where the funding was not for the benefit for the LibreOffice Community and LibreOffice OnLine logo as it should not be used at all.
I’m disturbed by the impression that you attack people in a very personal fashion, based on repeating inaccurate, worst-case assumptions each stated as fact. That seems to fall far short of the conduct we would expect here.
Let me address one simple question:
This is simple to answer, we were not aware of it. It was no part of our proposals, my views on LOOL are well known. AFAIK I was not aware that such a logo even exists; if I had been I would have asked to have it removed immediately - as I have now done of course.
I am afraid that harassing people who are taking the initiative, to try in good faith to promote LibreOffice is a deeply unhelpful thing. Your personal animus around many topics is quite obvious, please don’t extend that to nlnet & the EC who have contributed, and continue to contribute wonderful things to Open Source as a whole.
your insistence that something, anything, must be wrong here starts to look desperate - and your tone and insinuations are quite out of line.
The project that was funded was “LibreOffice P2P”, and the LibreOffice Online pieces (in mutual agreement with NLnet) were no longer part of it. I never claimed anything else, it’s just you.
The rest of your posting is based on this false premise (that I’ve now repeatedly told you is not factual), so I will refrain from dealing with it line by line. Suffice to say, that I’d very much expect you (like everybody else) to comply with community guidelines - and your repeated accusations couldn’t be further from the truth here.
As others have said, attacking generous funders of OpenSource might not be a winning strategy for TDF; and neither is jumping to conclusions & accusing people left and right, before asking that very funder about what actually happened.
I’m surprised to see that you are disturbed by the fact that I used the submission that Collabora Productivity made as a good example of how things should be done.
NLNet has done great things for Open Source software and all the people I met from NLNet are absolutely fantastic.
It is totally plausible that someone at NLNet was aware of LibreOffice OnLine, believed that your submission was related to it and used the LibreOffice OnLine logo for the funding category.
Mistakes happen and we’ll kindly ask to remove that logo and not to use it anymore.
I suppose you don’t see anything controversial in that.
Since NLnet has confirmed to the board that the project websites in question were set up by them with their best intentions, including the choice and display of our logos, I apologize to the representatives of allotropia and Collabora, also to our full-time code contributor trustees employed by them, that Florian, our executive director did not contact allotropia, Collabora, NLnet or the board as a whole, but went to the widest public, even if it was done with the best of his intentions.
As I myself am involved in this matter (as like one of the accused winners), and as I do not represent the board with this apology, I respectfully ask the board and the executive director to join me in bringing this matter to a calming conclusion, to make open source a real success that all contributors can share!
If any of the directors or the executive director still have any reservations, please share them (and me) with the people concerned so as not to embarrass them (and me) again. I stress this because the last message from our fellow board member who started the issue – “NLNet very kindly explained the situation and replaced the logo with a more suitable one straight away. The information now available leads to a simple mistake and not to an intentional use of the logo in that specific incident.” – may also suggest to some (like me) that there may still be cases where “intentional” error on the part of NLnet winners (including me) can be shown. As I am not aware of any such thing, and NLnet has not confirmed it, so that is why I ask for a truly reassuring closure of the matter from the board and the executive director.
For your information, while the NLnet funded LibreOffice developments were fully public on NLnet site and in my project page, I have also reported these developments in our immediate community several times, e.g.
Over the next few weeks, I will gradually add the newest results of LO/COOL Typography project to the Release Notes of LibreOffice version 25.8, e.g. the very basic interoperability of the hyphenated text in MSO 2016 and later has already been listed: ReleaseNotes/25.8 - The Document Foundation Wiki.
I am very happy about the near fully interoperable implementation of smart justify (optimized optional shrinking of word spacing), because of the extraordinary difficulty to decrypt and implement the algorithm, which was the most important secret improvement of MS Office 2013 and later, resulting losing our very basic text layout interoperability completely. My implementation in LibreOffice code base is probably the first in the world, both in free software and in propriety software, which allows to show and edit DOCX documents with the same layout. This would not have been possible without NLnet’s and EC generous support. These developments were funded through the NGI0 Entrust Fund, a fund established by NLnet Foundation with financial support from the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet programme.
would be interesting to know, how you’ll commit your changes to LOOL. As far as I know this repository was closed and sent to the attic three or four years ago.
Apart from simple unintentional mistakes related to logos that have been easily and quickly fixed, once we become aware of them, these items are connected to “intentional” issues that affected the discharge of duties of some members of the board.
Florian brought up very good points which should be evaluated in full now that we start getting a clearer view of what happened, thanks to the additional information we received, and how also these items affected TDF’s governance for quite a few years.
Unfortunately, old practices are still being maintained that only try to take the focus of attention away, in this case there are still several points that demand a response.
Why the repo was not opened even though Lothar voted conditionally until there are contributors? With the funding there, why is the repo closed anyway?
Why Laszlo has Paolo a CoI but Laszlo doesn’t when he got funded for work on online?
What is the difference between the p2p project at NLnet and the one TDF planned? There’s no refference in the latter to the former, are they independent?
What would the funds to NLnet would have been used for? These projects or something different?
How is it possible that none of the fund recipients noticed the website several years?, that is quite unusual.
LO means LibreOffice, not LOOL, in case that’s why you’re asking this.
Why I included Collabora Online in my application is that my LibreOffice core developments help all online office suites and services based on LibreOffice, including all LOOL forks, especially COOL/NextCloud Office, other web technologies, like ZetaOffice Web, and all the other web services, portals with their integration.
You can read more about this NLnet fund here, which helped to create better OOXML/MSO text layout interoperability in LibreOffice and in all online office suites and services based on LibreOffice:
The application and the awarding happened while the board was working to satisfy MIchael’s request to have a marketing plan promoting the valuable members of the ecosystem in exchange of finally making available LibreOffice Online to the community in an usable way instead of playing with what has been described in comments and board minutes as “artificial scarcity”
You decided not to make the board aware that you were awarded funds explicitly targeted to improve and add features to LibreOffice Online at the time.
When it seemed like months of effort from the board and the marketing team delivered a good draft the marketing plan Michael decided to breach the agreement he had with the board and forked LibreOffice Online.
Even then you decided to say nothing about the funding to improve LibreOffice Online or to step in to deliver the contributions that you were being funded to develop.
At the time you were still working for CIB and started presenting the project funded to improve LibreOffice Online as LibreOffice WebAssembly. Then you setup allotropia and apparently the funding moved there but no changes were made to the purpose of the funding.
The information we received state that it happened in 2022 so you deceived the board and the community for 2 years confirming what previously stated.
You were fully aware of the issues with LibreOffice Online when you applied for and when you got granted the funds to improve LibreOffice Online.
You were fully aware that the scope of the questions in relation to LibreOffice Online were made to determine if it was a community project hosted by TDF with the scope of providing the community and all that wanted to use it a “user-centered free/libre open source software” as from our statutes or a commercial project benefiting from TDF’s brands and marketing reach.
Once we got the answer to that question you still promoted your project as a community effort and refused to clarify the scope of it even after the recent experience with LibreOffice Online.
Before the offer to clarify what LOWA was going to become for the community and the offer to find ways for TDF to fund the efforts, in January 2022 when the board was unaware you were still funded to improve LibreOffice Online, the 16/02/2021 I’ve answered to Michael’s comment in relation an article about LOWA stating:
I’m sure you would agree with me that we should avoid a future situation where:
a project is presented to the community as being made in partnership with TDF
the community expects for that project to be made available for free under the TDF umbrella
the main contributor withdraws the project from TDF’s community as it’s now its only mean to make money
It’s a very hypothetical situation but I believe we should set expectations right from the beginning and we should set rules so that there is a good and open relationship between TDF and the ecosystem but with clear boundaries which avoid future unpleasant misunderstanding.
Anyone is welcome to develop their own solutions based on LibreOffice Technologies but that should not give them the right to be called part of “The LibreOffice team” or to claim endorsements from TDF.
Even then you refused to clarify if your project is a commercial effort to create your own product based on LibreOffice Technologies or a community effort that relases an improved LibreOffice Online for all to use.
The 25/08/2021, while still being funded to improve LibreOffice Online, you clarified your intentions about it by announcing the partnership with Collabora Productivity:
It’s only in 2024 that the scope of the project has been clarified and it is now reflected in the page where the original LibreOffice P2P project, that was supposed to improve LibreOffice Online, is redirecting to:
That would have been the correct way to present your project to get funding and to establish a clear relationship between your project and the community but you choose otherwise.
During all these years and also while you were the board chairperson you pushed to kill LibreOffice Online, you voted to put it in the “attic”, attacked and badmouthed all those that wanted clear agreements between commercial entities and TDF, those that presented facts and evidence showing that certain behaviour were at best unethical and damaging both TDF and the community and even lead an investigation to find a fellow member of the board in CoI with LibreOffice Online while keeping secret your clear CoI.
support the idea to get some clarity here (Thorsten)
Now that we clarified the situation with LibreOffice Online and the improved version that has never delivered let’s clarify another project to avoid once again the same issues in the future.
Have you received funding to develop LibreOffice CRDT to make it a community project hosted and supported by TDF following its statutes for the benefit of the whole community or it will only become a product of the subsidiary of Collabora Productivity?
Could you ask NLNet to adjust the project page to reflect what your plans are?
Once again, TDF welcomes projects based on LibreOffice Technology but it is important to clarify the relationship between the projects run by a commercial entity and TDF as non for profit organisation as well as setting the expectations for the community and the users.
The community guidelines do not forbid to present facts and evidence and there is more that can be shared if you want to continue the discussion.
I’m not sure after all your done as member and chairman of the board you have ethical and moral grounds to lecture others on community guidelines.
Neither TDF, nor allotropia, nor anyone else could replace the dozens of Collabora developers, this was behind the ESC proposal and board decision. LOOL was an abandoned mainstream, and this was confirmed by the delaying process:
Florian’s question was based on the incorrect information. My for-profit open source company didn’t get any fund. I have not and do not sell any online service based on LibreOffice, from which TDF does not benefit. My non-for-profit contribution funded by NLnet has resulted in a high level of development of the LibreOffice core (unique interoperability!), which has an exceptional and irreplaceable importance for TDF, helping a lot to guarantee its revenues in the long term, also to sustain LibreOffice development, which cannot be said with such certainty for all contributions. And finally, atticization of LibreOffice Online happened before I knew if I should apply to continue developing LibreOffice (I worked for the Hungarian public administration, leading a small LibreOffice development team).
They are independent. allotropia’s project was a proof-of-concept P2P library integration for a very narrow area (comments), presented at FOSDEM:
TDF’s project plan was to help to create a P2P development framework to design important parts of a future P2P office suite, filling the gaps between research and development, starting this by hiring a P2P project manager/expert. The original idea:
So the first was a down-to-top, the second is a top-to-down approach for P2P, which could have eventually converged.
The only thing that is certain is that a working LibreOffice solution requires several orders of magnitude more resources than NLnet has given to the proof-of-concept and that TDF would have given to the project manager.
No specific proposal was presented to the board, as I wrote. If I mentioned NLnet, it was because of the positive example of how a small organisation with a lot of expertise can help the EC’s Next Generation Internet programme, also LibreOffice development, by carefully funding small projects.
If, in spite of all the checks and balances in our statues and their adherence to them, tendering is stalled for years, then the organisation should renew itself, maybe by outsourcing tendering to a more competent and impartial third party, if and when this is possible and a real guarantee is given to TDF. Behind my idea was more the frustration that TDF board cannot act for the public good and for the long term. This thread shows exactly how divided our community is, which I have been serving since 1998 or longer.
According to NLnet’s answer and my experience, it is not unusual. We are small teams of small foundations, companies or simply individuals working hard on free software development, and often ignores what the other is working on in good faith.
Moreover, the end result of the NLnet projects are often different. Complex software development projects require considerable research, and often the direction of development is revealed as they go along. I can’t even list offhand how many problems in my case have been found to be serious interoperability problems, not just stray ideas, because they have not yet been discovered by our own bug reporters. NLnet has explicitly allowed to change the development direction in such cases for the public good.
It seems, after updating of the NLnet project page by NLnet, all the information are correct with allotropia’s P2P project:
let me share again with you the actual general issues:
In relation to your specific case it seems like you completely missed the point of the query about your funding page.
Once again, we look at the facts and draw our conclusions based on the evidence and experience.
The companies Collabora Productivity and allotropia are rightly appreciated for their great contributions to LibreOffice and for publishing their own products based on LibreOffice Technology being them funded by their own clients, by public money through various funding mechanism or tenders (once we can restart them using compliant procurement processes).
The issues have always been with the individuals that served as directors in TDF’s board and didn’t clearly separate their personal/business interests or their support for friends with personal/business interests from the role they had as members of the board.
You repeated all over the places that you got funded to develop the “LibreOffice/Collabora Online typography” which is totally fine and welcome that you as individual or through your company contribute to Open Source software including LibreOffice.
The issue comes when then you should wear your hat as TDF director, starting to objectively and impartially look at facts and evidence and act in the best interests of TDF.
The query that Florian raised is totally pertinent as looking at the evidence we have in public, in the directors’ mailing list, in minutes and now also in the project title, description and your own blog, anyone could wonder if you were in conflict of interest and/or uninterested in evidence available to the board when voting for matters related to LOOL/COOL, as well as many other matters, and that should be looked after finding out information confirming that also others acted in conflict of interests while influencing the board and voting.
Your comments then seem to contradict the purpose of the funding you received.
Could you confirm if you asked for and received funds to contribute to both LibreOffice and Collabora Online but then you actually only contributed to LibreOffice?
Once again, I’m very grateful for your contributions but I believe it is in general important, especially when talking about public funds, to be clear on the purpose of funds you received.
So why did you vote for someone in the same position to be in CoI and you did not vote to confirm the various CoIs others had and that were validated also by the legal counsels?
You have Collabora Online all over your blog, you were a contractor for Collabora Productivity years ago and you never sold any services based on LibreOffice so according to the logic you approved with your vote you are clearly in conflict with LOOL/COOL.
I know it sound stupid but either that determination was correct and you are in CoI or it wasn’t and you voted for something that you didn’t evaluate with the due objectivity and impartiality.
Which one do you choose?
Was that TDF’s project?
That’s very new to me, could you point to that project agreed by the board?
It seems like you haven’t been following board matters for the past 3 years.
A brief recap: tendering has been stopped and contracts have been invalidated because checks and balances did not work. As it seem you haven’t noticed a little more than 3 years ago we received written confirmation from our legal counsels that things weren’t good and following that we received audits confirming it.
I did try to get the majority of the board, which included you, to get things sorted but only lawyers managed to get the issues noticed:
It would be great if after 3 years you started to act following your fiduciary duties and actually looked at facts and evidence before making statements of that type or before voting.
TDF could have achieved a lot more but overlapping loyalties and a toxic environment in the board kept getting in the way since many years according to minutes and documents written even before I joined the board.
As you well know the issues this board has to deal with could have been solved in 2022 removing also the opportunity of creating all the other issues that then piled on to the existing ones. You could have made the difference and supported motions to fix those issues but decided to believe the false narratives that you’ve been fed instead of objectively and impartially look at facts, evidence and legal advice.
So if you want to look at one of causes of TDF being unable to act in the past 3 years you just need to find the nearest mirror.
I do respect you as a developer and contributor to LibreOffice but honestly your contributions as a fellow board member do not inspire me in feeling the same level respect at all.
If you could start reading and even challenging in an objective and impartial manner the large amount of legal statements, documents and emails you have available, as I’ve kindly asked you and other new members of the board to do when you joined in 2022, then you could still be in time to contribute positively to allow TDF to fulfil its mission and goals.
This explains why I had to use Collabora Online in my application, “as part of LibreOffice Technology, the key for the digital sovereignty of open source online document editing.”
I was one of those who most regretted what happened to LibreOffice Online, as I expressed then and now, but I respected and still respect the ESC – our main professional body – proposal and the facts. Both the free software community, our users and TDF need a strong, actively developed open source online office suite which is based on LibreOffice. This is what is currently driving the development of LibreOffice, too.
Yes, TDF’s temporary budget item for a P2P project manager. Thanks for the bug report!
the NextCloud Office is nothing else than Collabora Online integrated in NextCloud as an add-on. The same applies for example for EGroupware and further applications with integrated online office. Thus your work is not for a usable LibreOffice Online but for a commercial product only.
There is no LibreOffice Online or an active source repository for it. That was first freezed and later sent to attic by those in the Board of Directors of The Document Foundation with a clear Conflict of Interest (CoI) in LibreOffice Online. They have put their own business in the first place and is a violation of their duties in their role as members of the board.
let’s cut through this gish gallop of random pastes and quotes, and get to the core of the issue:
me, like many other community members, tried very hard to keep LibreOffice Online alive & part of the project - I’ve tried (unsuccessfully) to discourage you from your very aggressive approach back then - alas
I’m a positive person - the outcomes of today are regrettable, but clearly not foreseeable in 2020
I had therefore included LibreOffice Online as one possible user of the WASM port - but as you’ve learned now, it was not funded (and therefore not leading to a CoI)
conversely, you’ve lobbied very hard for unlimited, free binaries of LibreOffice Online - to the obvious detriment of TDF & this community - while clearly being under CoI
I’ve never pushed to ‘kill LibreOffice Online’ - quite the contrary, I tried very hard to build bridges and repair. There were a lot of attempts, reaching out, granting extra time, asking for people to come fwd and take over the maintainership of that abandoned repo. In the end, to avoid having TDF knowingly ship insecure abandonware, the ESC agreed to atticise it.
It’s a mystery to me, how you can with a straight face be mad at people for trying to attract funding to the project (both LibreOffice and Online), after you were the primary reason to kill the Online project at TDF. Claiming that I deceived anyone here is entirely nonsensical - or perhaps what you really meant, is that you yourself didn’t understand anything that was happening back in the day? But it’s hardly me who can be blamed for that.
On your concern about using code funded by NGI Zero / EC money in a commercial offering: that is not just permissible (as per the MPL license), but explicitly encouraged by the funder: TETRA #2 Summer Build-up bootcamp | Next Generation Internet