No particular problem with the manifesto - or the statues (when properly FOSS contexualized and translated). You will notice âgiving everyone access to office productivity tools free of charge to enable them to participate as full citizens in the 21st centuryâ. Surely - no citizen (or no-one) should be shut out from participating. Again I am in favor of LibreOffice for PCs being a free download forever. Collabora makes its mobile app available for free too.
Free Software doesnât have domain of use restrictions, so of course it is also free of charge for corporate use. But - this does not mean that we need to harm our project by demanding that hosters (Paolo?), and Governments and large enterprises should get the best software for them, provided free of charge - funded by citizen donors. At best this seems like an arguable point of difference inside the statutes.
Mandating that as a signed article of faith is controversial and unhelpful.
Iâm not a native German but I believe my expert friends who say âOffice-Software zur freien Nutzung durch jedermannâ is unambiguous in the context of FOSS. If we want a definition of Free Software we really want to checkout the FSF: [What is Free Software? - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation] and I quote:
âFree softwareâ means software that respects usersâ freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, âfree softwareâ is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of âfreeâ as in âfree speech,â not as in âfree beer.â We sometimes call it âlibre software,â borrowing the French or Spanish word for âfreeâ as in freedom, to show we do not mean the software is gratis.
In contrast - this change mandates that Libre-Office Trustees sign up to a vision that is gratis. That will do our users and our developers a huge dis-service as well as confusing decades of careful Libre vs. Gratis messaging. So this paragraph:
â*It was created in the belief that the culture ⌠will deliver free of charge the best software, in ⌠binary form, for ⌠corporations, companies, enterprises *â
Is, I think, a mis-description of the beliefs that TDF was created with - which were, and should be anchored in a traditional understanding of free software. So - I object.