Questions on NLnet fundings with the LibreOffice name

Hello,

in another thread, @PaoloVecchi added four links that caught my attention:

I would love to understand more about these projects.

One thing that is a bit irritating is that the project pages use the LibreOffice brand sometimes in a, let’s call it, “creative way”. We all should stick to the trademark policy TDF has put in place and to which a Guidelines and Best Practices wiki page exist.

That aside, I am curious to learn more about the projects.

First: Is the decision to freeze the LibreOffice Online repository compatible with seeking for funding with another nonprofit for LibreOffice Online? Shouldn’t the repository be opened again before?

Second: If I recall correctly, one of the proposals in a Munich in-person meeting was to send a bigger chunk of TDF’s funds to NLnet so they could do LibreOffice projects. I remember a heated debate around this and now I wonder if the funds would have been used for these projects. NLnet was mentioned in an earlier board meeting already, but I didn’t find further details.

Let’s also look at the projects individually:

NLnet; LibreOffice P2P

In the description, WASM seems to be refered to as “The improved LibreOffice Online”, even if the project ran for two years after “an Online move” and after LibreOffice Online was frozen as per a board decision using the back-then chairperson’s tie-breaking vote. I see the TDF product name and trademark, and the TDF wiki as “The project’s own website”, so maybe TDF should start to consider to actively do something with the code?

NLnet; Collabora Online/LibreOffice Accessibility

This project started more than two years after “an Online move”. It mentions Collabora Online, but clearly shows a “LibreOffice Online” logo, more than two years after LibreOffice Online was frozen as per a board decision using the back-then chairperson’s tie-breaking vote. Can anyone unwind the confusion?

NLnet; LibreOffice/Collabora Online typography

Paolo Vecchi was put under a conflict of interest on LibreOffice Online. This is already very problematic for several reasons. One interesting detail here are comments in a public board meeting like:

  • Paolo’s personal and business situation ignored so far
    • failed to establish a business relation with Collabora and CIB

The typography proposal shows the company another board member is affiliated with as running the project. Unless we want to establish double standards, there is something really wrong here that we need to address urgently. Why would one board member have a conflict, but not another one who seeks funding using the LibreOffice name and an edited logo? In addition: Should that board member have voted on the CoI declaration, it is very likely void altogether.

NLnet; LibreOffice CRDT

How does this proposal differ from the p2p proposal TDF budget 75.000 € for one year later? Do they complement each other? Are they mutually exclusive? The NLnet project seems to have been in place a year before the TDF proposal was made, but I don’t see any reference to it, so I am curious.

Thanks
Florian

Hi Florian,

Please do see my reply in that thread; presenting speculation as fact is deeply unhelpful as always. I expect the usage there can be easily fixed.

Your question about seeking funding based on the wrong brand is based on Paolo’s speculation, and did not happen.

Not sure I was there, but the minutes seem clear:

* lobby EU to use LibreOffice everywhere
  * as domestic technology with european values
  * and complement that perhaps with EU grant money (to possibly tender out in smaller chunks, c.f. NLnet)

To those unfamiliar with Latin. cf. there clearly means ‘compare with’. “see this other thing that works well and do similarly”. Or to put in simpler words: nlnet rocks - why doesn’t TDF do something similarly great ?. I don’t recall being there, but that’s what the minutes say to me. I would hesitate to force some horribly negative meaning on them.

The rest of your mail supposes that the individual proposal submitters have used and/or edited these logos and sought funding with them. That seems to be far from the case. Instead a wonderfully positive non-profit and well established participant in the FLOSS space has tried to promote LibreOffice and now gets it in the neck from TDF in public.

Regards,

Michael.

It remains vastly unclear what was funded actuallly, because there is repeatedly LibreOffice (incl. Online) mentioned, in the text, in the URLs, and in the the title. Additionally, if you check the guidelines in the wiki, there are logo modifications used that should not exist at all. Given the representatives of the companies to whom the funding seems to have been awarded have been in the board, some with a dedicated responsibility for trademarks, this is surprising.

My question is based on what I saw on the website myself.

No, you weren’t, and it seems there are no minutes of this conversation. It was a proposal by a current board member to send funding to NLnet instead of spending it directly as TDF. Me and others were quite concerned when we heard the proposal, and seeing the funded projects today, makes this proposal even more strange.

Don’t worry, Simple English is enough: It was another meeting.

Because some former board members - you can read who voted in favor - decided to “freeze” Online. If TDF freezes the repository it cannot do much with Online.

Again: I am not talking about NLnet.

Let’s see with images what “did not happen”

Request of clarifications here:

That’s funding that went to Laszlo’s company for a contribution related LibreOffice. It is very nice that Laszlo got funded for it but even there I do not understand why the LibreOffice logos are there and point to his web site. Why not putting his company logo pointing to his web site instead of misleading the readers that might have clicked to go to the LibreOffice web site?

Then why does Laszlo mentions Collabora Online?
Are the funds used to improve LibreOffice which in turn benefits also Collabora Online or the project was funding 2 separate typography issues and he forgot to put the Collabora Online logo?

This is an interesting one as it has the LibreOffice logo, it points to TDF’s wiki but, despite receiving funding using the LibreOffice brand, it was then marketed as being an allotropia product then re-branded ZetaOffice. Thorsten has been offered to present the project officially to TDF to see if we could fund it but he refused, the reasons became clear when news of Collabora Productivity came out during a board meeting in 2022, Michael’s presentation at FOSDEM in 2023 and then the acquisition of allotropia closed the circle.

The funding ran from August 2020 to October 2022, did anyone see these contributions in LibreOffice OnLine?

Did allotropia informed NLNet that they will not use the funds for LibreOffice OnLine as it was forked by Collabora Productivity into Collabora Online in September 2020?
If so, why they didn’t update the page to show where the money actually went?

Also here allotropia got funding in 2023 to develop what seems to be a community project, it even points to the LibreOffice web site but I have no idea if that’s supposed to be part of LibreOffice for the benefit of the community.

Nobody ever mentioned that “LibreOffice” was running that project and that LibreOffice would have had these feature thanks to NLNet funds.

So as we can see it “did not happen” but just to make sure that it really did not happen we should check with NLNet to see if they also agree that it did not happen and it was all a misunderstanding.

Ciao

Paolo

Hi y’all,

seems some people at TDF are getting increasingly shrill & aggressive around trademarks - and sadly much of what is presented here is very light on facts. On the bits that have my name mentioned:

This is LibreOffice, and all the code that was funded during this project is included in the core repository. If I may direct attention to the project start date: that was predating the (Paolo-induced) walk-out for LibreOffice Online; the project application was written even earlier.

Also here, it would help to establish facts, before jumping to conclusions. Work funded under this project is still underway, but what’s ready can be found in the LibreOffice’s core repository under LOCRDT-prefixed commit messages.

It seems deeply unhelpful to me, to attack those who write project applications, do the work, invest heavily & consistently over the years in the project (far beyond the mentioned seed funding) - and even worse, go after very generous funding sources - over something that could have been a community-driven & unifying project. Neither do I understand the motivation for this, nor can I follow the points made. It’s all quite sad to see.

And why I should have refused funding by TDF for any of this, is beyond my comprehension - funding was never offered, quite the contrary TDF stopped paying my invoices & froze all development tenders. It was moreover clearly “presented to TDF” (and the world at large), in numerous presentations, including FOSDEM LibreOffice dev rooms & LibOCons.

Best, Thorsten

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Paolo asked for what is entirely in line with the mission, scope, objectives and goals of The Document Foundation.

He did not “induce” the situation around LibreOffice Online. You can see who made that decision and voted for it.

Interestingly, the tie-breaking vote from the back-then chairperson had some additional comments:

[…] it is far more important, that we all try to engage old/new code contributors to the LOOL project for TDF.
With that I see this as a short term measure […]
So in this understanding for a short term period […]

These conditions seems to have been applicable the latest the funding was granted, so Online should have been opened up again.

What happened instead, Online was put into the attic.

No, some are getting quite annoyed at discovering even more cases where you deceived not only the board and the community but, according to the pages we can all see, also NLNet.

The funding description among other things states:

The improved LibreOffice Online will be able to provide end-to-end encryption – both for the peer2peer use case, as well as securely keeping documents encrypted when at rest.

Where is the improved LibreOffice OnLine?

Did you tell NLNet that a month after you got the funding you did nothing to improve LibreOffice OnLine and instead you advocated and voted to put it in the attic so that it wouldn’t worry your business partner anymore?

Did you tell NLNet that for 2 years you diverted the funds to develop your own product instead of actually improving LibreOffice OnLine?

Was NLNet informed of the overlapping loyalties that clearly influenced your actions as a director of a funded company and as a director/chairperson of TDF’s BoD?

Will you now give back the funds you used for a purpose that was not at all linked with keeping alive and improving LibreOffice OnLine so that other Open Source project can benefit from them for the purpose they describe in their application?

Are the funds you received going to be used to add features to LibreOffice this time or are once again being used to develop a product for the subsidiary of Collabora Productivity?

You wrote a project application that does not seem to match with what you spent the money for and some might even think that it really looks like a misuse of public funds.

We’ll clarify that with NLNet.

Of course it was offered and you even discussed it in public but then never followed up despite having been asked a few times:

Another example could be LOWA (LibreOffice WebAssembly), which is a promising project developed mostly by Allotropia AFAIK.

That’s why months ago I’ve asked you to lead by example by officially present the project to TDF in a couple of pages stating the objectives and what TDF could expect to deliver to the community while Allotropia pursues, rightly, its commercial interests. If you followed up we would have had already a document on which to base the agreement we need to welcome other projects.

It is great that companies invest in complex projects based on LibreOffice but, if those projects are to be hosted, promoted or even economically sponsored by TDF, we have to set the right expectations for the community and have a mutually beneficial agreement in place.

Failing to do so will lead exactly to the same outcome we have seen with LOOL.

If you made the board and the community aware that you got funded for “improving LibreOffice OnLine” in 2020 then a lot of things would have worked out in a very different way.

Instead you choose to mislead everyone including NLNet.

Hi @PaoloVecchi ,

Since sadly there was no LibreOffice Online anymore when we finally managed to get the WASM port going (early 2022), we agreed with the project partner that e.g. an in-browser PDF conversion would be nice, too. The aforementioned part of the project therefore did not happen (and was of course also not funded).

As outlined before already, indeed as the project description has it, this is code that is contributed into LibreOffice. My earlier description was necessarily technical, so please find someone who can read code and git logs, to confirm those contributions to you.

Ah, you were referring to yourself, not to TDF. Sorry then, indeed you personally offered me I should explain the project to you. I passed that offer at the time, since we couldn’t agree on almost anything back then - and there was already ample technical descriptions & talks about LOWA available. I otherwise stand by my earlier statement, that TDF never offered funding for LOWA, nor the LibreOffice CRDT project.

I hope my explanations above have you realize, that this statement is factually wrong. Please retract it.

Best, Thorsten

Hi Florian,

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)

The project page I edited:

https://numbertext.org/typography/

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!

Best regards,
László
member of the board

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:

https://nlnet.nl/project/InfiniteCanvas/

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.

No – we’re putting the foundation first, as it should be.

Hi Paolo,

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.

Regards,

Michael.

Hi @PaoloVecchi ,

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.

Best, Thorsten

Hi Michael,

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.

Ciao

Paolo

Makes perfect sense :slight_smile:

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 by Collabora Productivity in that specific incident.

Hi all,

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.

LibreOffice l10n list (2023): [libreoffice-l10n] State-of-the-art hyphenation for Danish, Dutch, German, Hungarian, Norwegian and Sweden – The Document Foundation Mailing List Archives

LiboCon 2024: Write better! :: LibreOffice Conference 2024 :: pretalx

COOL Days 2025: https://numbertext.org/typography/Hyphenation_Control_Achieving_Optimal_Readability_in_Your_Documents_COOL_Days_2025_Budapest.pdf

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.

Best regards,
László Németh
member of the board

Hi Laszlo, hi all,

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.

Regards,
Andreas

Hi Laszlo,

You are correct.

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.
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