Hi,
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:
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/2022-October/089483.html
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:
https://nlnet.nl/project/ZetaOffice/
Best regards,
László Németh
member of the board