Some propositions for TDF's future

[Sweetshark]

Hi @PaoloVecchi ,

@PaoloVecchi

I’ve been told by several sources that many people did not contribute as they had the feeling they would contribute to a third party product, although the company was a company of the ecosystem, instead of contributing to a community effort.

That is certainly true to an extend. Collabora had a clear and somewhat realistic vision on what they want to build and how it should be used. TDF – and the LibreOffice community at large – did not. Most of the “ideas” about that were – with a few rare exceptions – either technologically or economically unsustainable, or both.

I do not even think that is too surprising: the LibreOffice community never had to really envision such a thing from scratch before.

Best Regards, Bjoern

[PaoloVecchi]

Hi @Sweetshark,

@Sweetshark

TDF – and the LibreOffice community at large – did not.

Having a vision is good as it’s good to try things out. TDF’s BoD seemed to have it as well as IIRC financed with a sizeable amount of money, use of a brand and marketing, a project proposed by one of the directors that then became a commercial success.

If I were there at the time I would have supported that effort as well but I would have also asked for clear rules on a RoI for TDF and the community to avoid the foreseeable issues that TDF and the community encountered at a later stage.

@Sweetshark

I do not even think that is too surprising: the LibreOffice community never had to really envision such a thing from scratch before.

IIRC 11 years ago a bunch of clever developers came up with the idea of using an instant messaging protocol to enable people to do some basic collaborative editing and that wasn’t the only instance where community members came up with innovative ideas.

If someone came up with other interesting ideas, eg. using the Matrix protocol for secure collaborative editing or using WASM to run LibreOffice in a browser today then TDF would be in a better position for supporting those ideas as long as the rules and the RoI for the community are clear.

Ciao

Paolo

[thb]

Dear community,

perhaps a tad late, but I was only recently able to research the tender revenues for CIB (with which I’m no longer employed) -

@mmeeks

Board members associated with companies who were bidding on TDF tenders
have been completely and successfully excluded from any details[1] of
competing tenders, the selection process, who voted what way, what staff
said, what legal counsel was provided, they had no insight into
contracts and decisions made. They were completely recused.

That is/was appropriate and right, our statutes and common sense made
this clear. Obviously we can make the rules there even clearer and more
helpful too - why not?

However even better than the written rules - there was no leakage from
directors or staff involved that I ever saw: no quid-pro quos, nothing -

I’d like to confirm, and back-up the above. And to also state that the winner’s curse is real - we underestimated the work in almost every tender we got awarded.

On sales numbers:

• CIB bid for 9 tenders, and being awarded 6 over a period of 5 years. For TDF, that was less than 3% of the budget over that period, for CIB, it was probably less than one per mille of total revenue
• allotropia bid for 7 tenders, and being awarded 5 over a period of (almost) 3 years. For TDF, that was again less than 3% of the budget (assuming current 2023 donation projections are valid), for allotropia, depending on various factors, that will be between 5-7% of total revenue

It should be obvious, that this is an insubstantial part of our business (and not a very attractive one, relatively speaking - due to the high risk, and usually very unique personnel assignments).

Best, Thorsten