Some problems.

[mmeeks]

Hi all,

  This is a short summary of some of the problems that I see
with LibreOffice, and this is written with my personal / Collabora hat
on. People are welcome to question my motivations - but my mission is to
try to nurture a successful FLOSS project that creates excellent FLOSS
Office Productivity software and makes it freely available to all. Many
here will share that goal I hope.

  Nevertheless there are some big problems currently. Perhaps
you think you have a neat solution to one of them. I'd love to hear
about it - but solving or obsessing about just one is unlikely to do
the job:

* LibreOffice is at serious risk

  Frustration with how TDF markets and positions its 'product'
(LibreOffice) against the ecosystem that contributes the majority of
the coding work is at an all-time high. That ecosystem itself is under
long term stress.

  Despite years of patient work, writing up the problems here,
talks at conferences, personal pleas for change and improvement, and a
number of tweaks, nothing -effective- has happened. You can read about
the situation here:

https://people.gnome.org/~michael/data/vendor-neutral-marketing.html

* That's too long (despite the pictures); what are the problems ?

  Read the Ecosystem / Sustainability minutes from our board call.

  https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/BoD_Meetings#Minutes_2020-05-22

  I've helpfully appended it to this mail. It has the history of
the ecosystem to today presented by myself & Thorsten as bullets. Then
we have some of the ecosystem problems:

  + how to differentiate from LibreOffice:
    + support - but why buy that ? it's great.

  + how to differentiate inside the ecosystem ?
    + proprietary bits suck badly, obviously.

  + how to get the message out that it even exists ?
    + for less than the cost of the software.

  + how to get the message out that it is more authentic and
    genuine to get LibreOffice from those doing the majority of
    the code contribution, than the free version from TDF ?

  + how to build a brand that stands for quality and
    support vs. the Goliath brand: LibreOffice ?

  + how to make LibreOffice not mean "everything for
    free, please don't pay anything" to most users ?

  Anyhow - more details and some FAQ below:

* Surely companies have to buy support & security updates ?
  They always complain to me about the lack of support wrt.
  avoiding using FLOSS !

  Sadly no. Microsoft gives poor to non-existent support to the
majority of users so ~no-one expects to buy it, they expect to buy a
product. Enterprises tend to test a version & deploy it to their
desktops and leave it there - they can do that with LibreOffice from
TDF.

  It is routinely the case that I meet organizations that have
deployed free LibreOffice without long term support, with no security
updates etc. Try the Cabinet Office in the UK (at the center of UK
Government), or a large European Gov't Department I recently visited -
15,000 seats - with some great FLOSS enthusiasm, but simply no
conceptual frame that deploying un-supported FLOSS in the enterprise
hurts the software that they then rely on. Or a giant Pharma company
in the news right now; companies do it left & right.

  This became a familiar problem when after the OpenSSL /
heartbleed debacle it was discovered that just a couple of people were
part-time maintaining something vital to the whole world's internet.

  This is an extraordinarily common pattern, people come to tell
me how many free seats they've installed in large enterprises - and
while this is a triumph; they tragedy is that they stop at this point.
Far too often the whole thrust of the selling was "zero cost" - which
is a terrible way to market FLOSS. They are now used to downloading
Chrome or Firefox and deploying these advertising supported products
for free everywhere. Building our USP as zero-cost is a horrible way
to market LibreOffice to enterprises.

  So - lets turn this around - can anyone thing of more than
five enterprises that paid for support or instead (just as good)
contributed meaningfully to LibreOffice instead ? Munich, and ...

  Of course we maintain and promote lists of enterprises that
deployed for free with no support ?

  => It is the norm to deploy LibreOffice from TDF in
     enterprises, and pay nothing for support &
     maintenance that can go into development.
    + its that good.

* You're too expensive: I can get cheaper support from LXYZ instead ?

  Another pathology is that there are companies who ship
LibreOffice, often claiming support, but then file all their tickets
up-stream and hope they are fixed for free. Naturally they are cheaper
in government tenders, they use our brand, they leave the customer
with hundreds of un-fixed bugs, and all of the users with a terrible
experience.

  These companies also seem more 'genuine' since they call their
product 'LibreOffice', as compared to those who actually contribute
who try to build their own brands.

  This is not a small problem; there are many millions of users
in this situation, there are multiple companies I know of with scale
of $10bns in annual revenue, to Linux distros, to local service
companies who do this.

  => The LibreOffice brand is devalued and we have no way
     of telling people that the product they deployed was
     not suitable for deployment in an enterprise and has
     no effective support.

* but we tell people to get support & services already!

  Sure - there is some text on the download page (one of the few
pages with hits) - but it doesn't work, you can track the rates of
conversion, they are extraordinarily low before thet get off TDF. We
also mention this in our release notes helpfully, again - not
effective.

* Surely if we seed the market by giving apparent enterprise
  products for free - people will pay ! just give more away !

  Ten years in, we notionally have 200m deskop users - but we
have extraordinarily few paying for support & services. The conversion
rate is at the 0.01% level - not a million miles from the 0.05% level
that we see for people visiting the "professional support" page on the
TDF website.

  Even if we converted the whole world to LibreOffice on the
desktop, if the everything-free-for-everyone messaging continued - it
seems unlikely that we would be able to improve and sustain the
software.

  => emphasizing gratis from TDF over libre as we do
     ~everywhere probably screws up our ecosystem.

* Is it really so bad ? everything seems fine ...

  Words fail me to express how beyond-utterly-broken the
existing TDF / desktop model is for the ecosystem around selling
Desktop LibreOffice.

  Collabora - despite C'bra still putting a lot of work into
LibreOffice Desktop, having an outstanding support capability, doing
lots of marketing, being the largest code contributor to LibreOffice,
and having lots of existing happy customers / references for desktop
LibreOffice, ... etc. etc.

  We have not had -one- -single- -new- Collabora *Office*
customer since 2018 - zero.

  => so it makes no economic sense at all to invest in
     -Desktop- Libreoffice you will never see a return.

  That is manageable - we are investing heavily in creating
Online and that is going well, and it funds our work on LibreOffice.

  As an aside - what precipitated this new attempt to try to
sort this all out for me - is some on the Board wanting to bring this
known to be destructive for the ecosystem model of branding including
suggesting it is suitable for everyone without anyone paying,
competing with the ecosystem that creates 95% of Online, as well as
crushing our brand and hence lead-flow with the LibreOffice brand.

  Checkout the appended ecosystem history, this is a conclusion
our ecosystem has discovered left & right.

  Why does LibreOffice Desktop not have XYZ cool new feature I
badly want, contributed by companies: this is why.

* Other ideas: what about crowd-funding ?

  Various kind people have pointed users systematically at
crowd-funding sites in bugzilla and elsewhere. This has worked quite
well in the past for one or two features - but for more general or
smaller improvements has failed. I believe after some years we had an
~Eur 200 bounty for implementing an Online collaborative version of
LibreOffice put up vs. the Eur millions of aggregate investment this
has cost.

  So - focused crowd-funding for features can work - if there is
TDF marketing support particularly.

* But surely if everyone donates to TDF and all is well ? we
  just need to ask for more donations !

  Currently TDF sits on a ~Eur 1.5 million cash pile yielding a
zero to negative interest rate.

  For various complex, structural, organizational, legal
etc. reasons TDF has managed to effectively tender only one smaller
partial feature (related to ODF 1.3) since the ESC and Board voted for
community submitted items from 2018.

  However - even if TDF spent its existing budget on feature
development it would contribute around 10% of what the ecosystem
currently puts in.

  Possibly if we give TDF 10x more more money - it will become a
more dynamic organization (though still run by a committee of ten);
perhaps that is possible.

* These naming changes seem to suggest some people need to pay ?
  I won't be able to install it in XYZ enterprise if called Personal

  This is in large part a feature. Clearly people can use it for
free, just as before - but they would occasionally see the splash and
thing: "I wonder why it says Personal" (or another tag) there.

  Probably this nudge alone is enough to try to encourage real
contribution to LibreOffice, and get the numbers of users buying
support and thus contributing, or else contribuing themselves up from
~zero.

* Can't you differentiate by having proprietary add-ons ?

  I'm an old free-software hacker. To me proprietary things are
at best really unhelpful. The great goodness of having mild
differentiation and steering of people to buy support in the product
name, is that it avoids proprietary differentiation. You may recall
Sun/Oracle did this in the past with StarDivision and it was not much
loved. Also - the logic of this 'open core' approach is clear: invest
mostly in the non-open, non-core bits, which is bad for LibreOffice.

* Why change anything now ?

  As we look around the industry we see tons of organizations
exploring ways to solve similar problems. LibreOffice's is
-particularly- challenging, because we aspire to being a vendor
neutral project. There are reasonably well-known ways to build a
company controlled, branded, FLOSS project - we know and love lots of
them: openSUSE, Fedora, Nextcloud, ownCloud etc. this is the
norm. With TDF we tried to do something far harder - to create an
vendor neutral ecosystem that can help retain the community spirit
while delivering on our mission. That has proved extraordinarily
harder.

  The particular timing was precipitated by the demand to bring
the long-term proven zero-sales, zero-investment model to Online, and
to do so very rapidly for LibreOffice 7.0.

  This proposal was a constructive one to try to take the
potentially catastrophic risks associated with a single model and try
to ameliorate them by in a single step encouraging people to pay for
something, that can be re-invested.

  Perhaps having an 'Edition' in itself, while a tiny nudge is
enough regardless of its name to encourage people to make people ask:
is this right for me in an enterprise.

  We can go slow, or do something else - it is entirely possible
that something else works. For my part I would really appreciate that
we as a community test whatever marketing improvements are planned on
the desktop product (which can hardly get worse for the ecosystem), to
see if they are even slightly effective. Then as/when/if this works we
can apply it to other sub-projects like Online, when we know the
impact on the ecosystem.

  If we want a pure volunteer project, with no significant
ecosystem behind it we can see what that looks like over at the Apache
OpenOffice project. There is integrity in that of course, but is that
somewhere we want to risk going ?

  For my part - I'd like to try to work with others to
understand all of the motivations, and to somehow, together chart a
path towards a better way of marketing and positioning LibreOffice and
its ecosystem - as Italo has outlined. Many of the above issues are
significantly addressed in this proposal - and I think it forms a
great basis for discussion, hopefully its possible to map many of
these solutions back to the problems I outline now.

---

* Excerpts from:
  https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/BoD_Meetings#Minutes_2020-05-22

2. Inform/Discuss: Ecosystem & Sustainability (Michael & Thorsten, All 15min)

+ Board wants to be more transparent about decisions

   + that is good, but we need to publish more data.
   + please listen, absorb - everything we say will be
     in the minutes or published later:
   + questions / challenges possible at the end.

  "The foundation promotes a *sustainable*, independent and
   meritocratic community for the international *development* of
   free and open source software based on open standards."

LibreOffice has included companies into the ecosystem from the beginning

  + the word 'community' includes people working at companies
  + inspire a higher loyalty to the project & the idea: unifying.
  + economics seems harsh
   + value volunteers time & support of course.
   + need to model & understand these things - Eco-system

+ When we started:

    + Sun -> ~50 developers -> we were eager to include them
    + IBM -> ~10 developers -> tried to get them to work together with us
           + big happy family...
    + Oracle -> OpenOffice not a contributor to net margin -> gone.
    + IBM -> encouraged us to form, didn't join -> differentiation.
    + we all lost hard.
       + Then: Linux Distros
           + SUSE - 15 developers, RedHat -> 5 developers, Canonical - 1 developer
           + Munich? -> peaked at 7 - now down to ~1
           + The flourishing years 2012-~2014
                   + KACST ~5, CloudOn ~2, Igalia ~1.5, Lanedo ~2,
                     Ericsson ~2, Synerzip -> ~12,
                     MultiCoreWare -> ~15 (2 months)
                   + all of these disappeared: no economic driver.

  + More recently (Thorsten)
             + SUSE - 15 -> 0 devs. -> 2013
             + Canonical from 1 to 0 devs. -> 2017
             + RedHat from 5 to ~2 developers - 2018
             + can't assume Linux Distros would magically do the coding

+ Now we are here:
      + 1&1 -> 1 developer
      + Munich -> 1 developer
      + TDF -> went from 1 to 2
      + RedHat -> ~2 developers
      + RedHat -> 2 developers
      + NISZ -> 3 developers
      + CIB -> 7 developers
      + Collabora -> 25 developers
      + and some more volunteers.

The ecosystem is not growing, but not shrinking ~40 paid developers
       + very little virtuous cycle driving growth in sales -> feature / function

What does the ecosystem do ? (Michael)
       + ~70% of commits from ecosystem companies
               + tend: larger features, longer term development, maintenance, GSOC ++ mentoring
       + ~30% of commits community
               -> but ~70%+ of mentoring is companies.
       + look at how a project looks like with volunteers but no commercial ecosytem:
               + Apache OpenOffice -> good people ...

What does it look like in money ? (Thorsten)
       + easy to work out from our annual report
       + estimations ->
               + avg. TDF staff member FTE cost order of Eur 50k without overheads
               + So 40 people at TDF would cost ~Eur 2 million
       + TDF spends ~Eur 150k on feature development / tenders
         outside of fixed-costs per annum currently
               + do it in-house:
               + we could pay 3 people with that

The ecosystem provides a 10x multiplying factor for development
       => TDF is the tip of the iceberg that is the ecosystem.
       => We cannot meet our purpose or sustain the product without a healthy ecosystem.

Compromises to drive the ecosystem / pull money into it & TDF: (Michael)
       - no LTS - short, frequent release cycles
           + neither of these seem to deter mass use in business.
       - nag dialogs, info bar stuff -> to drive TDF donations
           + community members unhappy ... -> professional product.

       - tell people software is un-supported when inappropriately
         using Online - important for TDF to have users visiting
         download page, also for downloading security updates for
         LibreOffice

       + live updates provided by community as a patch / feature.
         + not enabled.
       + we know: when we don't update the "new version" XML
         + donations drop substantially
         + TDF is funded by people visiting the download page

  => Example -> providing free LibreOffice in an app-store
               + self-updating, no need to visit TDF ...
               + sounds wonderful - but potentially deeply problematic for TDF & sustainability.
               + needs to be looked at -very- carefully.

  Thorsten - People sometimes confuse paying for a product, when
  donating (c.f. feedback we see on Ask and Bugzilla)
    + normal feedback "I paid, but can't download"

  - TDF download donations sometimes believed to drive feature development
         + implement feature with money.

Desktop is quite different:

  - Online - currently scarcity: source code, only development binary dockers of online
  - CIB & C'bra charging for LibreOffice in app-stores & re-investing - perhaps others.

The "non-contributor" problem
    + Developers:
    + Munich -> initially didn't contribute to the code -> then saw the light & joined us
    + Linagora -> no significant contributions from whole French Gov't.
    + Brazil -> 1 million users -> no paid developers until recently.
    + others: RedHat/Collabora/CIB - contribute all their code back.
         + work as members of the community.

Conclusions (Michael)

       + why is ecosystem success seen as failure ?
       + why is the ecosystem 'othered' as non-community ?

       "The foundation promotes a *sustainable*, independent and
        meritocratic community for the international *development* of
       free and open source software based on open standards."

"The only constant is change" (Thorsten)

  Change is inevitable, and necessary -but- those who advocate
  for change without careful consideration of the consequences
  must bear responsibility.

  Need to assess, and balance - with the other compromises
  listed if parameters change substantially, we need a plan to
  substitute for what we're certainly loosing then in terms of
  ecosystem contribution.

  Lets not loose again after loosing Sun, IBM, Linux Distros ...

[thb]

Hi *,

Michael Meeks wrote:

  For my part - I'd like to try to work with others to
understand all of the motivations, and to somehow, together chart a
path towards a better way of marketing and positioning LibreOffice and
its ecosystem - as Italo has outlined. Many of the above issues are
significantly addressed in this proposal - and I think it forms a
great basis for discussion, hopefully its possible to map many of
these solutions back to the problems I outline now.

I'd like to second what Michael wrote (in its entirety, but
specifically highlighting the quoted paragraph).

Those of you knowing Michael and me for longer know that we tend to
disagree on very many things - but his analysis of the status quo, and
the risks of further de-monetising the ecosystem is spot-on.

This is not an easy problem (and the opensource industry at large is
struggling with it - the moment VC funding runs out, and money needs
to be earned), and therefore I don't think there's an easy fix for it.

LibreOffice wouldn't be what it is without the sometimes decade-long
work from all of you, in this community. This is why we want (and
need) your input and buy-in - we don't want to lose anyone over this
debate.

But if you look at the history of the project (both OOo and then
LibreOffice), you'll have to realistically conclude that for staying
competitive (better interop, new platforms, pivots like Online,
compelling features) - a chunk of money is needed, that someone with a
product management hat on can ~freely spend.

So that's what the proposal in front of us is meant to provide. Let's
pick it apart, let's constructively criticise it - but what I'd want
as an outcome in the end, is a plan that stands a chance of working
(and goes beyond keeping the - known-problematic - status quo).

Thanks a lot for taking part in this discussion, thanks for all your
work & passion - and here's to the continued success of LibreOffice!

Cheers,

-- Thorsten

[htietze]

I highly value expertise and would never object marketing. But this differentiation between Personal and Enterprise seems barely to be a solution.

So just to put this option on the table: Remove Online from the LibreOffice zoo and make it a commercial product.

Good thing on this Personal Edition kerfuffle is that people discuss the marketing strategy. I suggest to keep listening and postpone any modification for 7.1. We run out of time to revert the PE patch.

[mmeeks]

One clarification since it caused some private questions:

  Collabora - despite C'bra still putting a lot of work into
LibreOffice Desktop, having an outstanding support capability, doing
lots of marketing, being the largest code contributor to LibreOffice,
and having lots of existing happy customers / references for desktop
LibreOffice, ... etc. etc.

  We have not had -one- -single- -new- Collabora *Office*
customer since 2018 - zero.

  I think Thorsten stated more cleanly as:

  "The market for desktop libreoffice is tough;
   sales cycles frequently count in multiple years"

  which I agree with. Of course - we have also sold some seats of
LibreOffice Vanilla for Mac in the app-store, which is desktop & has
let us fix a number of Mac bugs. That's about 5% of C'bras income /
expenditure.

  Some people kindly offered to buy some seats. Sadly the transaction
cost (outside an app-store) of selling to an individual, or handful of
users is very significant: sales time, invoicing, accounting, account
setup, software setup, responding to tickets etc. makes this loss-making
for less than several 10's of users or pre-paid multi-year commitments.

  => so it makes no economic sense at all to invest in
     -Desktop- Libreoffice you will never see a return.

  That is manageable - we are investing heavily in creating
Online and that is going well, and it funds our work on LibreOffice.

  And of course for us Collabora Online is the tip of the spear for
investment & expected returns, with education being a key sector
currently. We have a growing set of customers there.

  That as well as some intermittent consultancy pieces lets us work on
improving lots of things in the LibreOffice core for our users.

  HTH,

    Michael.

[michaelweghorn]

Hi Michael, all,

to explicitly mention it: While insights I got by working for the City
of Munich certainly played a role in shaping that opinion, whatever I am
writing (and have written) on this topic is "with my volunteer hat on",
i.e. my personal opinion, not necessarily my employer's.

  This is a short summary of some of the problems that I see
with LibreOffice, and this is written with my personal / Collabora hat
on. People are welcome to question my motivations - but my mission is to
try to nurture a successful FLOSS project that creates excellent FLOSS
Office Productivity software and makes it freely available to all. Many
here will share that goal I hope.

Your (and Collabora's) work for LibreOffice is really much appreciated
and I fully share that goal, but have concerns regarding what I'll call
the "Personal Edition approach".

  Nevertheless there are some big problems currently. Perhaps
you think you have a neat solution to one of them. I'd love to hear
about it - but solving or obsessing about just one is unlikely to do
the job:

I admit I don't have a solution to all problems and certainly not the
experience and insight that others like you have there, in particular
regarding the ecosystem company side.

However, some personal comments/thoughts on some aspects below.

Simplifying and exaggerating a bit, I'd try to sum up the described
problem as "There's not enough revenue for ecosystem companies, but
those are essential for LibreOffice." and the described solution as
"Let's discourage enterprises/organizations from using LibreOffice from
TDF, and hope they'll use paid versions from ecosystem companies instead."

To sum it up, one of my main concerns is that organizations not using
"LibreOffice Personal" doesn't necessarily mean they'll use "LibreOffice
Enterprise". I see a rather high risk in the "LibreOffice Personal
approach" decreasing the overall LibreOffice use/market share, rather
causing organizations to switch to other office suites (or choose them
from the beginning), not just short-term. This probably wouldn't help to
reach the desired goal in the end, but rather have a negative effect on
both, TDF-provided LibreOffice as well as "LibreOffice Enterprise" and
the ecosystem that provides it.

* LibreOffice is at serious risk

  Frustration with how TDF markets and positions its 'product'
(LibreOffice) against the ecosystem that contributes the majority of
the coding work is at an all-time high. That ecosystem itself is under
long term stress.

  Despite years of patient work, writing up the problems here,
talks at conferences, personal pleas for change and improvement, and a
number of tweaks, nothing -effective- has happened. You can read about
the situation here:

https://people.gnome.org/~michael/data/vendor-neutral-marketing.html

Thanks for all the information, that's really informative and helps to
better understand the motivation/background.

* Surely companies have to buy support & security updates ?
  They always complain to me about the lack of support wrt.
  avoiding using FLOSS !

  Sadly no. Microsoft gives poor to non-existent support to the
majority of users so ~no-one expects to buy it, they expect to buy a
product. Enterprises tend to test a version & deploy it to their
desktops and leave it there - they can do that with LibreOffice from
TDF.

From what I have heard, there's also a tendency in (particularly in
large) organizations to only use products backed by some kind of SLA, so
there is some contractor to contact (or blame) in case of problems.
(Whether that helps in practice is another question, but from a
management perspective it seems to be a prerequisite in various settings.)

  So - lets turn this around - can anyone thing of more than
five enterprises that paid for support or instead (just as good)
contributed meaningfully to LibreOffice instead ? Munich, and ...

At least those 3 quickly came to my mind that IMHO qualify regarding
code contributions (which apparently depends on how you'd define
"meaningfully", though...):

* NISZ
* SIL
* TU Dresden [1]

Regarding paid support, I've at least heard from two or three
organizations, but don't know what amounts of money were/are involved
there; that's certainly something the involved ecosystem companies (so
basically you and Thorsten) know better...

  Of course we maintain and promote lists of enterprises that
deployed for free with no support ?

  => It is the norm to deploy LibreOffice from TDF in
     enterprises, and pay nothing for support &
     maintenance that can go into development.
    + its that good.

Might one (main) problem be that LibreOffice (from TDF as well as its
enterprise derivatives) just is not widely used by companies whose IT
strategy involves paying for their office suites (yet)?

IMHO, it'd be ideal to try to get more organizations switch to
LibreOffice editions from whatever they're using now which I'd expect to
increase demand for professional support as well. At least there seems
to be a trend towards FLOSS in general, which might help here.

As mentioned above, I'm wondering whether "discouraging" the use of some
"LibreOffice Personal" would actually encourage most of the current
users to use some "LibreOffice Enterprise" edition instead or rather
make them switch to alternatives, like e.g. OpenOffice.org, or
proprietary alternatives.

As written in my previous email [2], I agree that many larger
deployments involving "professional use" will probably want to use an
edition with some kind of professional support (e.g. due to Service
Level Agreements, long-term support, more stability, new features) and
the TDF-provided version won't fit their needs, regardless of whether it
has a "Personal" tag attached or not.
Therefore, also from the experiences that the City of Munich made, I
tend to expect that affected organizations will find this out (the
sooner the more they test before actual deployment...). I wouldn't say
(and don't understand what you write as if you would) that the main
problem is that LibreOffice from TDF "just is too good" already by
itself to make professional support unnecessary after all.
(For some organizations, that may be the case, but I'd say this is OK then.)

And for rather ill-managed deployments/organizations, as described e.g.
in the "Marketing – Product expectations" section in your paper, I'm not
so sure whether that's an issue that can actually be solved on
LibreOffice side, but tend to think that those organizations would
rather just continue using "unfit" and outdated versions of LibreOffice
or some alternative instead of switching to "LibreOffice Enterprise".

* You're too expensive: I can get cheaper support from LXYZ instead ?

  Another pathology is that there are companies who ship
LibreOffice, often claiming support, but then file all their tickets
up-stream and hope they are fixed for free. Naturally they are cheaper
in government tenders, they use our brand, they leave the customer
with hundreds of un-fixed bugs, and all of the users with a terrible
experience.

  These companies also seem more 'genuine' since they call their
product 'LibreOffice', as compared to those who actually contribute
who try to build their own brands.

  This is not a small problem; there are many millions of users
in this situation, there are multiple companies I know of with scale
of $10bns in annual revenue, to Linux distros, to local service
companies who do this.

  => The LibreOffice brand is devalued and we have no way
     of telling people that the product they deployed was
     not suitable for deployment in an enterprise and has
     no effective support.

While those companies may not contribute meaningfully to LibreOffice
upstream, I tend to think that they will probably manage to do their own
branded build of LibreOffice ("MyOffice" or whatever, without a
"Personal" tag attached), and then offer that with the same
(nonexisting) support for basically the same price.

* But surely if everyone donates to TDF and all is well ? we
  just need to ask for more donations !

  Currently TDF sits on a ~Eur 1.5 million cash pile yielding a
zero to negative interest rate.

  For various complex, structural, organizational, legal
etc. reasons TDF has managed to effectively tender only one smaller
partial feature (related to ODF 1.3) since the ESC and Board voted for
community submitted items from 2018.

  However - even if TDF spent its existing budget on feature
development it would contribute around 10% of what the ecosystem
currently puts in.

  Possibly if we give TDF 10x more more money - it will become a
more dynamic organization (though still run by a committee of ten);
perhaps that is possible.

That sounds sad and like it would be great to have that improved, even
if it's only a partial solution.

* These naming changes seem to suggest some people need to pay ?
  I won't be able to install it in XYZ enterprise if called Personal

  This is in large part a feature. Clearly people can use it for
free, just as before - but they would occasionally see the splash and
thing: "I wonder why it says Personal" (or another tag) there.

  Probably this nudge alone is enough to try to encourage real
contribution to LibreOffice, and get the numbers of users buying
support and thus contributing, or else contribuing themselves up from
~zero.

This might work, but as mentioned earlier, I see quite high risks it
might in the end make things even worse (and it's hard to guess, which
is true...).

In any case, as others have already said, I personally don't like the
idea of "actively discouraging" the use of TDF's LibreOffice, but it'd
be great to have an approach to more positively encourage the use of
enterprise editions.
Ultimately, the goal should be to somehow convince organizations
currently using other office suites to migrate to LibreOffice
(Enterprise), and I think that the popularity of TDF's LibreOffice plays
a vital role there as well.

Best regards,
Michael

[1]
https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/q/author:tu-dresden.de+status:merged+branch:master

[2]
https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/msg04586.html

[michaelweghorn]

  So - lets turn this around - can anyone thing of more than
five enterprises that paid for support or instead (just as good)
contributed meaningfully to LibreOffice instead ? Munich, and ...

At least those 3 quickly came to my mind that IMHO qualify regarding
code contributions (which apparently depends on how you'd define
"meaningfully", though...):

* NISZ
* SIL
* TU Dresden [1]

Regarding paid support, I've at least heard from two or three
organizations, but don't know what amounts of money were/are involved
there; that's certainly something the involved ecosystem companies (so
basically you and Thorsten) know better...

Two more came to my mind:

* BaseAlt, contributing to the KF5/KDE integration, Aleksei code-wise
[3] and Vera on QA side [4].

* BSI (German "Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik"),
funding the work on GPG4Libre (OpenPGP signing & encryption in
LibreOffice) [5]

On 08/07/2020 14.40, Michael Meeks wrote in [6]:

  => so it makes no economic sense at all to invest in
     -Desktop- Libreoffice you will never see a return.

  That is manageable - we are investing heavily in creating
Online and that is going well, and it funds our work on LibreOffice.

  And of course for us Collabora Online is the tip of the spear for
investment & expected returns, with education being a key sector
currently. We have a growing set of customers there.

  That as well as some intermittent consultancy pieces lets us work on
improving lots of things in the LibreOffice core for our users.

Out of curiosity:
Does that mean that much of the work that Collabora does for desktop is
basically not being paid for by customers directly, i.e. something that
Collabora invests into by itself?
Or is it more like the work is done in the context of online, and
desktop profits "implicitly" as well, since many of the changes in core
(like work being done in the document model) directly affect both,
desktop and online?

Best regards,
Michael

[3]
https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/q/status:merged+branch:master+author:darktemplar%40basealt.ru
[4]
https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2019/05/13/community-member-monday-vera-blagoveschenskaya/
[5] https://av.tib.eu/media/32312
[6]
https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/msg04598.html

[toki]

One clarification since it caused some private questions:

  Collabora - despite C'bra still putting a lot of work into
LibreOffice Desktop, having an outstanding support capability, doing
lots of marketing, being the largest code contributor to LibreOffice,
and having lots of existing happy customers / references for desktop
LibreOffice, ... etc. etc.

  We have not had -one- -single- -new- Collabora *Office*
customer since 2018 - zero.

  I think Thorsten stated more cleanly as:

  "The market for desktop libreoffice is tough;
   sales cycles frequently count in multiple years"

I'd blame the lack of sales on Collabora having a really bad website
(https://www.collaboraoffice.com), in respect to LibreOffice, Collabora
Office, and CODE. Start with the (United States? Canadian? Caribbean?)
$18/month/seat for an SMB. Is that the online edition, or the desktop
edition? Is that Tier 1 or Tier 2 support? The Tier 3 support page is
understandable, until you discover that despite asterisks, there is no
definition of either "high" or "medium". It doesn't help that there are
two grammatical errors on that page. (Since I'm being picky, there also
is a spelling error on one of the other pages.) No pricing in British
Pounds, despite being an English company?!?!?!

And of course for us Collabora Online is the tip of the spear for
investment & expected returns, with education being a key sector
currently. We have a growing set of customers there.

Wandering through https://www.colaboraoffice.com, I would never have
guessed that education was considered to be a key sector. Nor would I
know that Collabora GovOffice is claimed to be a key component of their
offerings.

As far as education goes, Collabora looks like they have created
plug-ins that easily enable IT to incorporate Collabora Online into
various commonly used environments in the academic and corporate world.
Not a mention of those plug-ins, or how they enhance each other, in
either their testimonials or white paper.

Is TDF/LibreOffice supposed to be doing marketing for and on behalf of
Collabora, Multiracio, etc?

jonathon

[uwealtmann]

Hi

sorry by being late on this.

Nevertheless there are some big problems currently. Perhaps
you think you have a neat solution to one of them. I'd love to hear
about it - but solving or obsessing about just one is unlikely to do
the job:

Ok, then some of my ideas to do by TDF

TLTR?: Become a professional managed organization (or or at least create a sufficient professionalized organizational segment - "from professionals for professionals"). Which also means: Take the tight resources of the TDF not to solve every problem in a do-it-yourself mentality but to get them solved with/by professional help.
Teach people that LibreOffice is not the gratis version of MS Office but a real great idea which they can and shall support in various ways. Till this field, then economic returns can be seeded and grow there; and this is something TDF can do. Don't try to force the TDF to do what it cannot (by statutes and/or by law) do; if it is a really important issue, create an independent structure for it.

Full Text:

1. Pay a ~professional to deliver a migration white paper for small, medium an large enterprises respectively. With does clearly mention the advantages of a professional support contract. With professional layout and management summary and whatever else it takes to get it read by a lot of interested people. Base this on a sound analysis of requirements, not only on marketing labels (as written somewhere else).
Therefor look for advice from marketing experts (NOT of sales or PR or communication or the like professionals who call themselves "marketing expert"!) (sorry Italo, you are undoubtedly a highly qualified communications professional, but you're not doing marketing in my sense).

1a. Even if they are true, avoid statements like "...and can significantly reduce the Total Cost of Ownership of enterprise PCs because it replaces the license cost with a substantially lower migration cost" in an official document (LibreOffice Migration Protocol, p. 1 in this case)! Anyhow, the migration protocol seems to be a good starting point.

2. Pay a full time LO developer to do mentoring workshops on a regular base, embedded by a communication campaign also led by a PR ~professional, advertising these workshops in local (modern social) media. I. e.: For Germany/DACH rent Linux hotel for one week and offer a hacking LO workshop there for (nearly) free - and advertise that widely in DACH media (not only IT centered ones), based on a ~sound media analysis of what is read by our targeted group. Both effects - educating/recruiting programmers and having a widespread LO image campaign - will be worth the money.
Besides that we still suffer from the "OpenOffice - oops, I meant LibreOffice"-effect (OpenOffice meant a as class of software, not perceived as a distinct product vs. LibreOffice) and still have to establish the right name for the right product by an image campaign.
Develop this an a "standard"-module (by documentation, standard teaching material, checklist, do's and don'ts...) to encourage local communities to copy that for their country (similar as the conference is a teamwork between la local community and a professional, experienced orga-team at TDF). Send them the developer in case of need.

3. Pay a ~professional organization to deliver a basic set of training materials under a CC license (i.e. attribution share-alike). Which may then been translated by the community - or enterprises using them. Lack of local training capabilities often seem to be the bottleneck of migration projects, so we should enforce them.

5. Set up a professional qualification structure (like lpi) with certificates and all this stuff. At least give the picture of doing so.
"LibreOffice Certification is completely different from commercial certification... TDF is looking for LibreOffice Ambassadors, able to provide value-added professional services to grow the LibreOffice ecosystem."[1] is a nice try but will not foster commercial organizations to trust in - rather to get suspicious.

6. Stop trying to use TDF as a selling point. Won't work and even worse damage the project. It's ok to express concerns where TDF is standing in the way of business (or "ecosystem") interests and helping it stepping aside. But having the managers in charge of all of the tree "ecosystem partners" mentioned on our website [2] as members of the BoD leaves me pondering.
Perhaps we should also put a definition of what is an "ecosystem partner" (and what to do to become one) on that page.
btw: this page [2] should imho not be in "downloads" but in "Discover".

6. ...still thinking...

[1] https://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/certification/
[2] https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/

[italovignoli]

Thanks for the appreciation as communications professional. By the way
during my career I have been Vice President Marketing for Honeywell IS,
which at the time was second only to IBM in the computer business, then
- as a consultant - Marketing Manager Europe for Adobe, in charge of all
activities for PDF and Photoshop (both products were not doing so bad)
from 1989 to 1999, when I was hired by Macromedia to launch the Internet
product suite (Dreamweaver and all the associated products, but that was
indeed a less successful experience), and then I moved - always as a
consultant - to Dell in Italy until 2004.

I have been in marketing roles from 1981 to 2004, or 23 years, although
for quite some time I have had a different "formal" role as the company
I was working for was not focused on marketing specific consultancy.

I have attended a master training course about B2B Marketing at General
Electric Management School in Crotonville (NY) when I was at Honeywell,
and I have a BA in Marketing Management at ISTUD in Italy.

Of course, I respect your opinion about my limited marketing skills, so
this is just for your info.

[mmeeks]

Hi Uwe,

TLTR?: Become a professional managed organization

  I imagine it's not just Italo that has concerns with that =)

Teach people that LibreOffice is not the gratis version of MS
Office but a real great idea which they can and shall support
in various ways.

  Totally behind that; marketing more of the project and less of a gratis
product.

Till this field, then economic returns can be seeded and grow there;
and this is something TDF can do.

  Clearly we need to educate people.

Don't try to force the TDF to do what it cannot (by statutes
and/or by law) do

  Of course.

if it is a really important issue, create an independent
structure for it.

  The ecosystem though has a lot of competing independent structures,
each with different strengths, and interest in bringing LibreOffice to
different niches. Clearly having more players there would be good,
though having a single hyper-privileged one would not. But possibly new
structures are needed I suppose.

  ATB,

    Michael.

[uwealtmann]

Hi Italo

but you're not doing marketing in my sense.

Thanks for the appreciation as communications professional. By the way
during my career I have been..and I have a BA in Marketing Management at ISTUD in Italy.

Of course, I respect your opinion about my limited marketing skills, so
this is just for your info.

Very interesting, didn't know in detail - but I've always known you're good in what you're doing
What I mean is more about effectiveness vs. efficiency: It's no question that your doing an excellent job in what you're doing - but are you doing the right things (which for sure wasn't alone your decision what to do)?

Coming back to "doing marketing in my sense": So you can point me to a sound analysis of requirements of our market from which our product development as well as our market communication is coherently derived? Very interested in reading that.

[italovignoli]

Of course, we have never performed such an analisys, because we have a
peculiar development process which is IMHO rather difficult to steer
according to the usual marketing process.

I did try to do a similar exercise when I joined the community in 2004
(with a limited community and zero FOSS development experience), and I
was told that it was a loss of time as the development was following a
different path.

So, I have tried to flip the approach and promote the product as it is
and build a narrative to provide the missing user focus (the MUFFIN I
invented for the UX is a good example of this approach).

Yes, it is not the ideal approach. Yes, we should identify the user
clusters, and for each user cluster have a list of features which have
to be included, and schedule their development/announcement over the
life of a release.

Is this possible? Based on our development model, I do not think it is
possible. We know that in Bugzilla there are end user requests for new
features which have been sitting there for years, because either there
was no request from the same feature by enterprises willing to pay for
them, and there were no developers willing to work on them.

So, either we decide - and this is entirely possible - to invest some
money on TDF sponsored features, which reflect user needs, and at that
time we spend time to figure out the features by looking at requests,
and cross checking them with the needs of user clusters, or we risk to
spend time in a very interesting activity (I still remember having fun
during planning sessions at Honeywell, with heated discussions on the
opportunity to offer user visibility on the paper path inside laser
printers, which was a killer feature I imposed to engineers, being the
only one using printers in the group) without any visible result.

Having a limited amount of time, I have always tried to be pragmatic,
which of course has pros and cons. During my career, I have always had
to reach some compromise to reach the objectives, and in the case of
FOSS development is to manage marketing in a peculiar way, so that the
focus is more on communications that on product marketing (if you look
at LibreOffice 7.0 release notes, you will realize that by no means we
can call them "release notes" according to a marketing definition, but
this is what we have and what we can rely on for the announcement, and
either we wait to have them perfect - something will never happen - or
we use what we have).

[mmeeks]

Hi Michael,

  Thanks for engaging here ! =) you write a friendly and helpful summary.

Simplifying and exaggerating a bit, I'd try to sum up the described
problem as "There's not enough revenue for ecosystem companies, but
those are essential for LibreOffice." and the described solution as
"Let's discourage enterprises/organizations from using LibreOffice from
TDF, and hope they'll use paid versions from ecosystem companies instead."

  Right; it -could- be seen as a simple "developers for users" trade off.
I'm not sure it is a trade-off though: I think we'll win more users by
having happy enterprise users and more investment in feature / function
and a richer product myself.

To sum it up, one of my main concerns is that organizations not using
"LibreOffice Personal" doesn't necessarily mean they'll use "LibreOffice
Enterprise". I see a rather high risk in the "LibreOffice Personal
approach" decreasing the overall LibreOffice use/market share, rather
causing organizations to switch to other office suites (or choose them
from the beginning), not just short-term. This probably wouldn't help to
reach the desired goal in the end, but rather have a negative effect on
both, TDF-provided LibreOffice as well as "LibreOffice Enterprise" and
the ecosystem that provides it.

  There is risk in any change, but also risks in stasis - particularly
when we know the status quo doesn't work well.

https://people.gnome.org/~michael/data/vendor-neutral-marketing.html

Thanks for all the information, that's really informative and helps to
better understand the motivation/background.

  My pleasure; it's eighteen months old, but of course almost nothing
changes in that time.

From what I have heard, there's also a tendency in (particularly in
large) organizations to only use products backed by some kind of SLA, so
there is some contractor to contact (or blame) in case of problems.

  I've met a few organizations like this - but they seem to be extremely
rare. Can they even get an SLA for Firefox or Chrome ?

  So - lets turn this around - can anyone thing of more than
five enterprises that paid for support or instead (just as good)
contributed meaningfully to LibreOffice instead ? Munich, and ...

At least those 3 quickly came to my mind

  Sure; there's a reason I picked five

Regarding paid support, I've at least heard from two or three
organizations, but don't know what amounts of money were/are involved
there; that's certainly something the involved ecosystem companies (so
basically you and Thorsten) know better...

  So - I was talking of new contributors; how many can we think of that
are new since 2018 ? =)

  => It is the norm to deploy LibreOffice from TDF in
     enterprises, and pay nothing for support &
     maintenance that can go into development.
    + its that good.

Might one (main) problem be that LibreOffice (from TDF as well as its
enterprise derivatives) just is not widely used by companies whose IT
strategy involves paying for their office suites (yet)?

  We're really quite widely used; our 200+m users includes many large
government and business deployments.

IMHO, it'd be ideal to try to get more organizations switch to
LibreOffice editions from whatever they're using now which I'd expect to
increase demand for professional support as well.

  I think this was one of the headings in my mail. With the current %age
up-take of professional support we run out of world population before we
get enough developers to make LibreOffice fly.

As written in my previous email [2], I agree that many larger
deployments involving "professional use" will probably want to use an
edition with some kind of professional support (e.g. due to Service
Level Agreements, long-term support, more stability, new features) and
the TDF-provided version won't fit their needs, regardless of whether it
has a "Personal" tag attached or not.
Therefore, also from the experiences that the City of Munich made, I
tend to expect that affected organizations will find this out

  Well - it took Munich a long time to find this out I think; furthermore
our marketing tends not to make people effectively aware of the
existence of, nevermind the benefits of, support / migration / training
- even in the abstract. It also tends to make people believe the
software is created by Volunteers + TDF at many points. I guess
enterprises think that TDF is sustained by donations from end-users, and
volunteers just train themselves & contribute - so ... no need to
support the ecosystem ? =)

  You may notice the other discussions here arguing for a replacement of
the explicit recommendation to get support & services from the download
page (which we know doesn't work) with a suggestion.

  => The LibreOffice brand is devalued and we have no way
     of telling people that the product they deployed was
     not suitable for deployment in an enterprise and has
     no effective support.

While those companies may not contribute meaningfully to LibreOffice
upstream, I tend to think that they will probably manage to do their own
branded build of LibreOffice ("MyOffice" or whatever, without a
"Personal" tag attached), and then offer that with the same
(nonexisting) support for basically the same price.

  Sure - but they will have to put their own brands on something and
associate the terrible reputation for support with their brand not the
LibreOffice project =)

  Possibly if we give TDF 10x more more money - it will become a
more dynamic organization (though still run by a committee of ten);
perhaps that is possible.

That sounds sad and like it would be great to have that improved, even
if it's only a partial solution.

  Sign up, join the board & make things happen. We need more smart polite
people in the board and/or the MC.

  Probably this nudge alone is enough to try to encourage real
contribution to LibreOffice, and get the numbers of users buying
support and thus contributing, or else contribuing themselves up from
~zero.

This might work, but as mentioned earlier, I see quite high risks it
might in the end make things even worse (and it's hard to guess, which
is true...).

  If there are large numbers of users who refuse to contribute anything
in enterprises - and they will switch away if we ask them to: it seems
to me we're unlikely to get much from them anyway.

  I try to think well of people, so I do think there are a large pool of
well-meaning people who like our brand, and product and who - if
effectively steered - and can provide a clear and plausible rational to
their management: "We can't deploy the Personal edition - we need to use
the Enterprise edition" - will seek out and support the project in this
way. Every LibreOffice deployment must have an enthusiast behind it: but
(apparently) none of them can effectively encourage anyone to pay; what
can we do to help them ? =)

In any case, as others have already said, I personally don't like the
idea of "actively discouraging" the use of TDF's LibreOffice, but it'd
be great to have an approach to more positively encourage the use of
enterprise editions.

  Differentiation is like that. Somewhere we have to have a page which
says: "Who should use what version" - and/or the enterprise people have
to have a way to say: use XYZ version for ABC reason. I hear lots of
good-ideas about adding proprietary features & value for ABC - but
they're not attractive to me. A simple marketing message would be great
that does this differentiation in one place outside of the software.

Ultimately, the goal should be to somehow convince organizations
currently using other office suites to migrate to LibreOffice
(Enterprise), and I think that the popularity of TDF's LibreOffice plays
a vital role there as well.

  Unless someone tells them that TDF's LibreOffice is not suitable for
their enterprise - their first (and final) stop is to deploy
GratisOffice I'm afraid, ~all the data points in that direction. They
see GratisOffice as more genuine, and legitimate and authentic than
Collabora Office eg. which is pretty depressing given how much we put in.

  Conflating your other mail:

  And of course for us Collabora Online is the tip of
the spear for investment & expected returns, with
education being a key sector currently. We have a
growing set of customers there.

  That as well as some intermittent consultancy
pieces lets us work on improving lots of things in
the LibreOffice core for our users.

Out of curiosity:
Does that mean that much of the work that Collabora does
for desktop is basically not being paid for by customers
directly, i.e. something that Collabora invests into by
itself?

  I mentioned New desktop customers since 2018. We have a big mix of
existing larger customers to whom we are grateful many of whom renew:
though getting 100% renewal is ~impossible, and growing that is hard.

  We have a set of faithful consulting customers though they are highly
intermittent: since we solve their problems well, they go away & we have
to acquire new customers.

  Then the other problem I have is a soft heart & over-enthusiastic
programmers. Customers tend to put these puppy-dog eyes on and say: "I
can't afford it, but surely you'll do it anyway at ~below cost; it's all
for the good of the project / product" - and I get suckered (again), and
then on top our staff do an extra specially good job that goes beyond
the minimum the customer asks for - and consume a ton of time doing that
- and in any circumstance estimating time for projects is a nightmare -
so when you look at the economics, it ends up loss-making. It is far
from trivial running a business.

  In another adjacent thread - people say our marketing sucks, and we
should invest a ton more in that - sure, but given finite resources - I
like to invest in LibreOffice development - only, we can't get any
return on the desktop - so its just madness.

Or is it more like the work is done in the context
of online, and desktop profits "implicitly" as well,
since many of the changes in core (like work being done
in the document model) directly affect both, desktop
and online?

  There is a chunk of this too; but not nearly enough perhaps that will
increase over time; it is/was the idea of having a shared code-base.

  It is of course, also worth noting that CIB does great stuff across the
codebase, so well worth asking Thorsten similar questions too.

  Thanks !

    Michael.

[uwealtmann]

Hi

we have a peculiar development process which is IMHO rather difficult
to steer according to the usual marketing process.

To be honest: The part with "from which our product development" was a joke, knowing the facts as well.
(btw. the product is that mature it seems rather difficult to me to find useful new features which affect more than a dozen people - except UI improvements maybe)

But what's about "sound analysis of requirements of our market from which our market communication is coherently derived?"

Let's say we have three sources of knowing user requirements:

1.) Bugzilla end user requests for new features
2.) Askbot questions on features mostly existing but not known (which for the user asking makes no difference to 1)
3.) Anticipation of upcoming market developments (i.e. increasing WFH) and requirements which may come out of this

Getting these analyzed on more than a face-validity base may guide our communication to be more targeted on user requirements and therefore more interesting or compelling for them (i.e. how to set up a workflow with lots of off-premise users). Maybe even the ecosystem takes profit out of such an analysis - developing LOOL wasn't decided after the fifth beer in a bar, I presume.

And a user requirement must not necessarily be a function of code. Is there a requirement for single seat support contract? Mike says no, but maybe this is also a hen/egg situation?
Is there a need to have some expert talks on i.e. how to do product neutral call for bids? Which in return may get us some ecosystem partners?
Or maybe we need no more better hairnets but a hairspray kind of idea?

Meant just as examples.

[ilmari]

Michael Meeks kirjoitti 13.7.2020 klo 21.32:

From what I have heard, there's also a tendency in (particularly in
large) organizations to only use products backed by some kind of SLA, so
there is some contractor to contact (or blame) in case of problems.

  I've met a few organizations like this - but they seem to be extremely
rare. Can they even get an SLA for Firefox or Chrome ?

They can for Firefox since last year, but only if they are in the U.S.: https://www.ghacks.net/2019/09/12/firefox-premium-for-enterprises-is-now-available/

"Firefox Premium Support is a new offer for Enterprises that provides organizations with improved support options. The plan provides access to an Enterprise customer portal, improved bug submission options and bug fixes, SLA management tools and more."

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/enterprise/#plans

It seems if you visit the enterprise URL outside U.S., you won't see the offer for Premium.

Ilmari

[mmeeks]

Hi Jonathon,

  I think Thorsten stated more cleanly as:

  "The market for desktop libreoffice is tough;
   sales cycles frequently count in multiple years"

I'd blame the lack of sales on Collabora having a really
bad website

  So, if getting sales is only a function of a really good website - I
would really suggest that you enter the market, make a fortune -and-
contribute that back to LibreOffice =) all are welcome in the ecosystem.

  Beyond that - creating, maintaining and translating a website into a
handful of languages is an expensive hobby.

  Another (fading) problem is that what most of us love to do is to write
FLOSS code that improves our customers' lives and to contribute it to
LibreOffice =)

  You're right - we probably should spend less on that, and more on
finding FLOSS-friendly people that like to produce polished marketing
copy (CV's to my inbox) - but perhaps you can forgive the imbalance.

Is that the online edition, or the desktop
edition? Is that Tier 1 or Tier 2 support?

  Worth digging out my mail on the counter-intuitive negatives of
answering all questions on your web-page =)

  ATB,

    Michael.

[toki]

  I think Thorsten stated more cleanly as:

  "The market for desktop libreoffice is tough;
   sales cycles frequently count in multiple years"

I'd blame the lack of sales on Collabora having a really
bad website

  So, if getting sales is only a function of a really good website

I think it was Brian Tracy who wrote if your website can't sell the
qualified prospect, it needs to be redesigned.

For a previous generation, Joe Girard wrote that the presentation you
create, should have the suspect reaching for the pen to sign off on the
deal, before they had finished looking at it.

Websites provide a first impression, and if that impression is negative,
that is the end of the story. You never hear from those suspects.
Learning that the website automatically disqualified the firm, is
something that an organisation rarely directly hears from the former
suspect, and is even more rarely believed by the board. Third party
surveys consistently indicate that a bad website loses business. It
literally doesn't matter if the firm is B2B or B2C orientated.

Beyond that - creating, maintaining and translating a website into a handful of languages is an expensive hobby.

When you don't know if the pricing is US dollars or Canadian dollars,
you've got an issue. (Years ago, Howard Stern paid one of the
bubble-headed bleach blondes he specialises in interviewing, a billion
Zimbabwean dollars, for her appearance. She was so excited about
receiving so much money, she never stopped to convert it to US$. It was
just under US$100, which was well below the usual appearance fee.)

Budget US$100,000 per language per year, for a multilingual website.
This is addition to the cost of designing and maintaining the website.
Before adding languages, look at both the financial ROI, and PR value.
Will the language generate at least US$1,000,000 in additional business
each year? IOW, will adding a page in say, Flemish, generate
US$10,000,000 in additional revenue, over the next decade. Revenue that
the organisation would not have had, had the Flemish pages not existed?

Is that the online edition, or the desktop
edition? Is that Tier 1 or Tier 2 support?

Worth digging out my mail on the counter-intuitive negatives of answering all questions on your web-page

That gets into the "how much information is too much information"
debate. Enough information to qualify the suspect as a prospect,
discourage the tire-kicker, and not get struck off, because it appears
that the organisation can't solve the suspect's problem.

The last thing any business owner wants to hear from a current customer
is "I went with company x, because I didn't know you provided that service."

jonathon

[michaelweghorn]

Hi Michael,

thanks for your reply.

Simplifying and exaggerating a bit, I'd try to sum up the described
problem as "There's not enough revenue for ecosystem companies, but
those are essential for LibreOffice." and the described solution as
"Let's discourage enterprises/organizations from using LibreOffice from
TDF, and hope they'll use paid versions from ecosystem companies instead."

  Right; it -could- be seen as a simple "developers for users" trade off.
I'm not sure it is a trade-off though: I think we'll win more users by
having happy enterprise users and more investment in feature / function
and a richer product myself.

I fully agree with the latter part, let's describe it as:

  more contributors => richer product => more users

My assumption is still that having more users will also result in more
contribution:

  more users => more contributors => richer product

The nice thing is that if you combine both of them, that results in:

  ... => more users => more contributors => richer product => more users
=> more contributors => richer product => ...

(which could probably be better depicted by some nice graph showing a
circle with continual growth, but I think the idea is clear...)

The interesting question then is how/where to start.
And my concern is that the "Personal Edition approach" will lead to
fewer users and I'm not so sure this will ever be compensated either in
the medium or the long run.

  There is risk in any change, but also risks in stasis - particularly
when we know the status quo doesn't work well.

The "Personal Edition approach" *might* work of course; it's not what
I'd personally expect, though.

From what I have heard, there's also a tendency in (particularly in
large) organizations to only use products backed by some kind of SLA, so
there is some contractor to contact (or blame) in case of problems.

  I've met a few organizations like this - but they seem to be extremely
rare. Can they even get an SLA for Firefox or Chrome ?

Ilmari has answered the explicit question regarding Firefox support
already. (I wouldn't have known myself.)

In any case, the wording "only use products backed by some kind of SLA"
probably was a bit too strong and there are other factors limiting what
software that applies to.

While browsers are certainly mission-critical these days, the facts that
they are available for free (i.e. gratis) and the existence of web
standards make it easier to have multiple browsers in parallel or switch
between them (at least these days, was certainly different in the past),
making that a somewhat less "critical" component in my eyes regarding
professional support.

In theory, document standards should allow switching between office
suites or using them in parallel as well, but that is known to be much
more difficult in practice, due to interoperability issues and
additional components on top, like macros or all kinds of third-party
software, so the office suite becomes some kind of "platform" that is
mission-critical and not easily replaceable.

I think organizations with such an approach (use software with SLA for
mission-critical tasks, in slight variations of where this applies) are
not too uncommon among larger organizations; maybe too few of them are
using LibreOffice for various reasons (never heard of it, never heard
there is professional support available, doesn't fit their needs,...).

I fully agree that it's unfortunate if migrations to LO (and FLOSS in
general) are/were done/encouraged only because it's "free as in free
beer", "no cost at all", which certainly isn't key to success for either
the enterprise nor the LibreOffice ecosystem.

  So - lets turn this around - can anyone thing of more than
five enterprises that paid for support or instead (just as good)
contributed meaningfully to LibreOffice instead ? Munich, and ...

At least those 3 quickly came to my mind

  Sure; there's a reason I picked five

Adding the two from the follow-up email, those that came to my mind
(without checking git log):

* NISZ
* SIL
* TU Dresden
* BaseAlt
* BSI (German "Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik")

And of course, there's RedHat, if all enterprises except those listed in
the "Ecosystem partners" section on the website [1] count...

Regarding paid support, I've at least heard from two or three
organizations, but don't know what amounts of money were/are involved
there; that's certainly something the involved ecosystem companies (so
basically you and Thorsten) know better...

  So - I was talking of new contributors; how many can we think of that
are new since 2018 ? =)

Regarding all contributions, NISZ falls into that category; but I don't
know details regarding paid support, those are presumably not publicly
available.

To be balanced, when talking only about new contributors, I think it'd
also be good to consider how many new (enterprise) users there actually
are since 2018. Do you know whether such numbers are easily available?

  => It is the norm to deploy LibreOffice from TDF in
     enterprises, and pay nothing for support &
     maintenance that can go into development.
    + its that good.

Might one (main) problem be that LibreOffice (from TDF as well as its
enterprise derivatives) just is not widely used by companies whose IT
strategy involves paying for their office suites (yet)?

  We're really quite widely used; our 200+m users includes many large
government and business deployments.

IMHO, it'd be ideal to try to get more organizations switch to
LibreOffice editions from whatever they're using now which I'd expect to
increase demand for professional support as well.

  I think this was one of the headings in my mail. With the current %age
up-take of professional support we run out of world population before we
get enough developers to make LibreOffice fly.

I tend to have a more optimistic view here, given what happened e.g. in
Munich and the contributors mentioned above.

I think one/the key point where we have different expectations is
whether we believe (enough) large enterprises and governments tend to
ask for professional support when using LibreOffice as mission-critical
software. - And we have obviously made different experiences there as
well, which may be one reason for this.

Besides the existing examples already relying on support and/or
contributing back to LibreOffice themselves, there are also those that
you mention as "bad examples" in your initial email:

  Another pathology is that there are companies who ship
LibreOffice, often claiming support, but then file all their tickets
up-stream and hope they are fixed for free. Naturally they are cheaper
in government tenders, they use our brand, they leave the customer
with hundreds of un-fixed bugs, and all of the users with a terrible
experience.

In those cases, a demand for support clearly exists (but is met in a
non-optimal way; I think Sophie's email [2] describes it well).

Maybe trying to steer that into another direction would be a huge step
forward?

In case the customers are actually making bad experiences, is it
possible they'll be more willing to pay more when they do the next tender?

While public tenders have a tendency to select the provider with the
lowest price, criteria like expertise in the area - proved e.g. by
having LibreOffice-certified staff - could possibly of help here.
So a key question here might be where those companies look for (and
easily find!) information how to do things better next time (or right
from the start)?

As written in my previous email [2], I agree that many larger
deployments involving "professional use" will probably want to use an
edition with some kind of professional support (e.g. due to Service
Level Agreements, long-term support, more stability, new features) and
the TDF-provided version won't fit their needs, regardless of whether it
has a "Personal" tag attached or not.
Therefore, also from the experiences that the City of Munich made, I
tend to expect that affected organizations will find this out

  Well - it took Munich a long time to find this out I think; furthermore
our marketing tends not to make people effectively aware of the
existence of, nevermind the benefits of, support / migration / training
- even in the abstract. It also tends to make people believe the
software is created by Volunteers + TDF at many points. I guess
enterprises think that TDF is sustained by donations from end-users, and
volunteers just train themselves & contribute - so ... no need to
support the ecosystem ? =)

The more I read and think about the topic, the more it seems to me that
this may be a/the key problem.

In general, I'd be fine about making it more obvious/prominent that
professional support via ecosystem companies is available, and it's
recommended to organizations to actually make use of it, and think this
is actually crucial to improve the situation.

The primary place where I'd expect such notes is on the LibreOffice website.
I just visited libreoffice.org, and the way where I'd look first is
under "Get Help" -> "Professional Support", which mentions this after
introducing the different kinds of certification:
"If you are interested in their services, the list below shows our
certified developers and professionals - with their affiliation - in
randomized order."

I wouldn't read any explicit recommendation into that, maybe that'd be a
good place to encourage/emphasize that further?

  You may notice the other discussions here arguing for a replacement of
the explicit recommendation to get support & services from the download
page (which we know doesn't work) with a suggestion.

As mentioned, I myself have no general objections against recommending
professional support and services at appropriate places and even
clarify/strengthen that where appropriate, thus "positively encouraging"
making use of those.

However, the "Personal Edition approach" with the suggested label is
rather discouraging the use of TDF LibreOffice, which I see as a
different approach, one I don't like.

While those companies may not contribute meaningfully to LibreOffice
upstream, I tend to think that they will probably manage to do their own
branded build of LibreOffice ("MyOffice" or whatever, without a
"Personal" tag attached), and then offer that with the same
(nonexisting) support for basically the same price.

  Sure - but they will have to put their own brands on something and
associate the terrible reputation for support with their brand not the
LibreOffice project =)

I'm wondering, however, whether that is actually perceived much
differently from what actual ecosystem companies provide. Both are "some
vendor-branded office suite based on LibreOffice", or is there some
additional obvious distinction for those who don't know more about the
background?

Related question: Would LibreOffice's current Trademark policy [1]
(currently or in adapted form) actually require to not use the name
"LibreOffice" when disabling the "Personal" branding, e.g. via autogen
option?

I'm wondering what Linux distros will do if so, e.g. I can hardly
imagine some enterprise Linux distro like RedHat's or SUSE's shipping
"LibreOffice Personal" - and don't think it would be helpful to have
something similar to what the Firefox/Iceweasel situation was like in
Debian.

  If there are large numbers of users who refuse to contribute anything
in enterprises - and they will switch away if we ask them to: it seems
to me we're unlikely to get much from them anyway.

I pretty much agree here with what Justin wrote in [3].

I even think it's fine if there are organizations using LibreOffice for
free if it actually fits their needs. As long as there are enough others
that contribute in some way, that should not be a problem, so I don't
see a need to "force" them to use something different instead.
(And I do not think that an unsupported LibreOffice fits the needs of
most, in particular large, organizations, so there should be "enough
need" for professional support.)

In the end, I think that in general, even "just" using LibreOffice is a
contribution by "spreading the word" and making the software known to
more people, as happens e.g. in universities that might otherwise fall
back to providing just other (proprietary?) software to their
students, who will later become the people to decide in enterprises, etc.
(That of course doesn't really apply where LibreOffice isn't suitable
and results in a horrible experience...)

At least among the (non-IT) people that I talk to, many initially have
no idea what I'm talking about when I mention LibreOffice, about half of
them know OpenOffice, though, and ~everybody knows MS Office.

  I try to think well of people, so I do think there are a large pool of
well-meaning people who like our brand, and product and who - if
effectively steered - and can provide a clear and plausible rational to
their management: "We can't deploy the Personal edition - we need to use
the Enterprise edition" - will seek out and support the project in this
way. Every LibreOffice deployment must have an enthusiast behind it: but
(apparently) none of them can effectively encourage anyone to pay; what
can we do to help them ? =)

This assumption/case (there are already people who want to contribute,
but their management doesn't want to) wasn't clear to me earlier.

In fact, my assumption of a wider use of LibreOffice leading to more
contributors mostly works where IT management does a good job without
having to be forced to do so. And I fully agree that the "We want to use
LibreOffice just because it doesn't cost anything" approach is generally
not helpful, but may even cause more harm then good.
(The same is true for FLOSS in general, not just LibreOffice, IMHO.)

In any case, as others have already said, I personally don't like the
idea of "actively discouraging" the use of TDF's LibreOffice, but it'd
be great to have an approach to more positively encourage the use of
enterprise editions.

  Differentiation is like that. Somewhere we have to have a page which
says: "Who should use what version" - and/or the enterprise people have
to have a way to say: use XYZ version for ABC reason. I hear lots of
good-ideas about adding proprietary features & value for ABC - but
they're not attractive to me. A simple marketing message would be great
that does this differentiation in one place outside of the software.

I fully agree.

Ultimately, the goal should be to somehow convince organizations
currently using other office suites to migrate to LibreOffice
(Enterprise), and I think that the popularity of TDF's LibreOffice plays
a vital role there as well.

  Unless someone tells them that TDF's LibreOffice is not suitable for
their enterprise - their first (and final) stop is to deploy
GratisOffice I'm afraid, ~all the data points in that direction. They
see GratisOffice as more genuine, and legitimate and authentic than
Collabora Office eg. which is pretty depressing given how much we put in.

Yep, the question is just what the best way to tell them is.

Regarding the main "target audience":
Is the assumption that (most of) those people who need to be told
actually don't know that there is and they might want professional
support or that they know, but still ignore it?

In the former case, adding the relevant information (professional
support available and encouraged for enterprises) more explicitly to the
website or maybe using existing mechanisms to inform the user (like
mentioning support in the donation/contribution infobars or add a "Tip
of the Day" with that info) might be a good way of dealing with this, in
my opinion.

For the latter case (they know, but don't want to), this wouldn't help,
of course, but I think there are legitimate use cases in that area as well.

One scenario e.g. is also if an organization uses TDF's LibreOffice, and
does code contributions or pays an ecosystem company to fix bugs or
develop new features, and is happy to get them with the next TDF (minor)
release.
While I understand that you prefer a license-based approach to this one,
this is still contribution we shouldn't discourage (but rather
encourage) in my opinion.
(I know of at least one university that went with this approach.)

  Then the other problem I have is a soft heart & over-enthusiastic
programmers. Customers tend to put these puppy-dog eyes on and say: "I
can't afford it, but surely you'll do it anyway at ~below cost; it's all
for the good of the project / product" - and I get suckered (again), and
then on top our staff do an extra specially good job that goes beyond
the minimum the customer asks for - and consume a ton of time doing that
- and in any circumstance estimating time for projects is a nightmare -
so when you look at the economics, it ends up loss-making. It is far
from trivial running a business.

I really appreciate and highly respect that way of not doing things just
for business sake but with a deep interest in LibreOffice itself. =)

But I see the difficulties and that actually sounds related/similar to
the topic being discussed here...

Obviously, it's much easier for me to make assumptions on how things
may/should work without actually running an ecosystem company, so thanks
for your engagement.

Best regards,
Michael

[1] https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/
[2]
https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/msg04720.html
[3]
https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/msg04681.html

[Telesto]

The 'free beer' argument starting to become annoying;-). I'm hearing lots of self-pitty.
Nobody asks a company to contribute to the LibreOffice code (for free). Yes, it belongs to a model where you believe in.
If you believe code be open source, while making profit, it's also your task to come up with a business model generating revenue.
Not only with some vague outlines/sketches. Full blown business plan include marketing plan is needed.
Say you're going the bank. And say he, I want to lend some money, say € 1.000.000 but € 2.00.000 would also be nice.
I'm starting my own company selling support for LibreOffice. I'm professional engineer have a development team, and some experience in the business.

I assume you have to a lot more to get those 1.000.000 euro/pound/dollar. The will scrutinize your plan; being harsh unfair etc
The want a business case, business plan, marketing plan (for example targeted  audience).
A income prognosis etc. For what I have read here, there are only rudimentary sketches. I think it's possible, but it's not easy. Ubuntu isn't profit machine either.

Even in the luxury position you don't have to go to a bank, it's still needed! Except if you want to opt for lots and lots of costly experiences.

The world is hard and pretty unfair. Artists sold songs on CD with big labels.. Everything is on Youtube these day's. Revenue now is made by concerts etc.
Papers still trying to find a proposition. Paywall/ ad-financed (ad blockers)/ being free (guardian). Wikipedia still screaming/begging/nagging for money. 2% of all users world wide donate! 2%!!

The commercial company's have to handle piracy.. Else the product sold free, but still used freely.

Telesto

[thb]

Hi Michael,

Michael Weghorn wrote:

In the former case, adding the relevant information (professional
support available and encouraged for enterprises) more explicitly to the
website or maybe using existing mechanisms to inform the user (like
mentioning support in the donation/contribution infobars or add a "Tip
of the Day" with that info) might be a good way of dealing with this, in
my opinion.

Yes - the important aspect here being, that many users in a corporate
deployment would never see the download page. So indeed a way to bring
those facts in front of users' eyes is important. The Personal (or
rather more likely, given the discussion here, Community) tag would
deliver that.

But clever ways to insert that into info bar or tips of the day would
be cool, too - it's just that a window title bar mention is visible
~all the time, whereas info bars are used sparingly.

I have no insight into the psychology here though, whether one or the
other approach would be more effective in nudging. Perhaps we can try
both?

Cheers,

-- Thorsten