[VOTE] Revoke votes related to LibreOffice Online atticiziation and freezing of repository

Board Discuss
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#41

So lets do that ! I would love to know who is leading this discussion? is there a plan we can discuss? what is the timeline? In the substantive comments - so far I see horror around the business impact of the decision - replied to by denial from TDF, there is rather little discussion sadly.

I assume this, along with your accusation that it is me who is being divisive (in querying this fork) - are added primarily for ironic & humerous effect - if so - very funny!

And more comedy. What you point at was an un-related gtk-broadway based prototype, it has no connection with online today (which is massively more complex), and as an aside was anyhow written by people who are today Collaborans (since SUSE stopped investing in LibreOffice for economic reasons).

For a rather complete history of who did what and when would make a better read and perhaps readers would notice that the fundamental missing piece here is not free git repo hosting, but the very significant investment needed to create the code. You should also take to heart slide twelve. Also anyone with half a second can check the git history of online and see that this is nonsense.

Conclusion your comment is hyper-misleading, refers to an obsolete prototype that went no-where, and misses the big point here - which is that the economics is vital - or (put another way) the food chain drives ecosystems.

#42

Dear @mmeeks,

as you know I fully respect you as a developer and for having built a successful business on top of joint efforts made with TDF and the wider community.

However, by keeping this attitude of attacking TDF and spreading false and/or misleading statements you are not making things easy for anyone.

Why are you attacking TDF for simply having fixed one of the many governance issues that have been left to it to handle?

I was pointing at when the cooperation with TDF that led to creation of LibreOffice Online started. A cooperation that led to contributions that went well beyond code and that materialised also in substantial funding to create yet another prototype. The code, of course, changed but what didn’t change is the fact that LibreOffice Online was promoted as a community project to get as much visibility as possible.

You surely remember that I was in the room when you presented those slides. When you asked me if I had comments about it I limited myself by just stating that there were a lot of missing pieces that would have provided a very different reading of that presentation.

Maybe I should have started filling up those gaps then by presenting documents, board minutes, emails and marketing plan to clarify things a bit and avoid this never ending misrepresentations of past events.

Nobody ever disputed that you provided most of the code but it seems you never want to take in consideration what TDF and the rest of the community did to get you to a point where LibreOffice Online was a viable commercial product.

First of all, you keep missing the big point that this vote simply fixes governance issues.

This board approved Code of Ethics and fiduciary duties, an improved version of the Conflict of Interest Policy and new Community Bylaws which transposed the lessons learned from the past with the hope that future boards will not make the same mistakes including those that led to this vote.

Then you prefer to ignore the other big point that is the marketing plan which included also the “Community” tag and many other steps was being implemented to give you what you, your employees, business partners and contractors wanted. The hope was that it would also attract other organisations in the ecosystem but with you dropping out without warnings in the middle of it then you destroyed the whole plan and the benefits that it would have brought to you and a wider, more diverse ecosystem that we could have created together.

It pains me to think about the big opportunities of growth for TDF, the community and the ecosystem that have been missed in the past 5 years but I still hope that, once we fixed some outstanding issues, we will be able to create more opportunities together.

LibreOffice Online is at present just a starting point for something that could move on from where it was left or something completely new. It will be up to those that would like to contribute to help in defining the new strategy.

I hope these few comments refreshed a bit your memory and that will lead you to have more constructive approach when posting in this forum.

Ciao

Paolo

1 Like
#43

Hi Paolo,

I’m not really sure how that relates, but I have only two convincing explanations for our business success (such as it is) to date: divine providence, and/or the passion and excellence of the team, partners and community I love to work with. Consider if you will the courage and love for the codebase that lead Kendy, Andras, Miklos, Tor, Kohei & Muthu to risk joining a company with initially half of one customer. My respect is with them for helping to keep LibreOffice alive at another dark time when external investment was declining, and we had to be spun out of the safety of SUSE. Then again - many of us also had a lot to do with creating LibreOffice too particularly Caolan who put his career on the line at RedHat as I did at SUSE to provide engineering muscle, not to mention the innumerable other community heros who have ended up in the Collabora team to accelerate the codebase since and today contribute so much, not to mention the allotropia team merging into the fun more recently.

This new pattern of you repeatedly claiming I’m lying and misleading people in this forum is unhelpful. I was closely involved at each stage of the Online story, often hacking on the code and communicating too - and I find your descriptions inaccurate. But lets take a single simple example: apparently this is primarily about fixing a (contrived) governance issue:

But the E-mail vote starting this thread as picked up by lwn seems to contradict that with this rationale:

Which seems to align well with your personal interest. While the press-release as picked up by the register and others pulls out other things than the claimed simple governance fix:

I can only assume such plans are discussed privately and internally, as there seems to be little sign of a public discussion here.

Regards,

Michael.

#44

Shouldn’t everyone at TDF want to have an Online version of LibreOffice? Our very own manifesto says "To eliminate the digital divide in society by giving everyone access to office productivity tools free of charge to enable them to participate as full citizens in the 21st century"

It would only be problematic if Paolo asked for a big blue button on our download page, which states business users should go to Paolo for their office instead of using the TDF-provided binaries. Or if Paolo asked for a “Home edition” of LibreOffice that is not to be used with mission-critical documents, which is a feature Paolo’s office provided however. Or if Paolo voted to close the repository and point to Paolo’s Online office instead.

None of that did happen.

2 Likes
#45

Hi @floeff ,

your understanding of what a Conflict of Interest is, appears inconsistent with at least the common definition:

Someone accused of a conflict of interest may deny it exists because they did not act improperly. A conflict of interest can exist even if no improper acts result from it. (One way to understand this is to use the term “conflict of roles”. A person with two roles—an individual who owns stock and is also a government official, for example—may experience situations where those two roles conflict. The conflict can be mitigated—see below—but it still exists. In and of itself, having two roles is not illegal, but the differing roles will certainly incentivize improper acts in some circumstances).

This is somewhat surprising to read from you, after the extensive discussions we had over the past several board terms. Precisely because of this very nuanced reality, the previous board had established the habit to have all board member declare their ‘interests’ (without any judgement), for every call. Sadly the current board did not continue with that, despite the very obvious presence of multiple CoIs (staff membership, business interests, family interests).

Best, Thorsten

#46

In the current board, everyone who has a potential conflict fully abstains from even discussing such matters, let alone decide on them or be in charge of them in areas of oversight. It would have been good if previous boards had adapted that same behaviour.

The previous version of the CoI policy had foreseen exactly such rule, recommended by our German lawyer, but not all past board members were in favor of it, so it did not make its way into it. This only happened in the updated version, which was initiated by the very same Paolo who got called out earlier in this thread.

And what Paolo asks for is what the very TDF Next Decade Manifesto states. Fulfilling TDF’s mission, in TDF, is actually a board member’s duty, not a conflict.

If someone works at a social café, you cannot claim they have a conflict just because they are eating. They would have a conflict if they sent customers to their own restaurant.

2 Likes
#47

many of us know the story behind the creation of your company and there is no doubt that everyone respects the work of the many developers involved and their decision to stick with LibreOffice when the companies they worked for decided to stop their investments on the desktop environment.

We should surely celebrate the good work of your contractors but you keep forgetting to consider how much TDF and the rest of the community invested into the success of LibreOffice which also contributed in a significant amount to the success of your company.

What has been unhelpful is that you haven’t been told in clear terms, and in public, to stop with your false and/or misleading statements and narratives a long time ago but the mantra was to keep it quiet as some wanted to keep the appearance that everything was just fine.

That was, IMHO, a big mistake as it allowed your behaviour, supported by some of your employees, contractors and business partners to carry on unchallenged creating grief for many, making it impossible to create a diverse ecosystem, slowed down the growth opportunities for TDF, its community, LibreOffice and consequently also your company.

There is a lot that could be said about your current and past behaviours and actions as there is a lot of evidence related to it but I would consider it counterproductive to expose all of it in public while professionals are involved in the process that hopefully will help in settling a lot of issues allowing all of us to move forward in more productive ways.

All these public misleading statements, from yourself, your former employees, contractors and business partners, of course influenced a number of journalists that have no access to board minutes, documents, legal statements and email threads as otherwise they would have been writing very different stories.

I’m pleased to see that Moritz Förster wrote things as they are, on the Heise, mentioning the governance issue we addressed as the vote was carried out “including members with conflicts of interest from the commercial ecosystem”.

Many of us naturally noticed that you kept going on with your false and/or misleading statements also on LWN and that is very sad.

What makes it even more sad is that since a while you started using your company, which we all respect, as a vehicle to spread misinformation through the comic strips which we all know to be your own personal stabs at TDF.

Do you think it’s doing any good to the image of your company?

Maybe Collabora Ltd, which owns half of your company, should check if Collabora Productivity Ltd’s time and funds should be used to publish material that some would interpret as negative messages toward foundations/non for profits hosting Open Source projects in general while others would see misinformation aimed at damaging TDF.

As you anyway decided to do that, maybe you could also start posting your false and/or misleading statements and narratives in your own company forum, instead of doing it here, so at least you won’t have anyone pointing out what’s wrong with what you write.

You are one of the invited parties to the discussion on how to move LibreOffice Online forward so maybe, instead of carrying on with negative and misleading statements you could start participating to the conversation in a constructive way.

1 Like
#48

Dear @thb

it is very surprising to read that you want to lecture others on a topic for which you consistently demonstrated a lack of preparation. It seems like you also completely forgot the legal statements we received as a board while you were a director or those that were even clearer while your were the chairperson.

Wikipedia isn’t the most authoritative source but as you reported a small snippet of it let’s see if the section before the one you mentioned finally helps you understand a bit more this topic:

A conflict of interest can, however, become a legal matter, for example, when an individual tries (and/or succeeds in) influencing the outcome of a decision for personal benefit. A director or executive of a corporation will be subject to legal liability if a conflict of interest breaches their duty of loyalty.

You could then follow the link to the duty of loyalty to understand more about it:

Duty of loyalty in corporation law to describe a fiduciary’s “conflicts of interest and requires fiduciaries to put the corporation’s interests ahead of their own.”[3] "Corporate fiduciaries breach their duty of loyalty when they divert corporate assets, opportunities, or information for personal gain.

This has been explained to you and board members in all possible ways but up to now it seems like these concepts don’t resonate with you and unfortunately many others.

These are just few of the elements that a person should take in consideration especially when thinking about becoming a director of a non for profit organisation.

As it seems some haven’t yet learned the lessons derived from past behaviours they can review their understanding of how to behave, from more authoritative sources than just some snippets from a Wikipedia page, by reading the Community Bylaws, the Code of Ethics and Fiduciary Duties and naturally the Conflict of Interest Policy.

1 Like
#49

Wanting LibreOffice Online is one thing, the real question is who’s going to spend the effort on it? TDF can add developers to the project, as the board intends to do, but TDF’s resources are limited, and effort spent here is effort not spent on LibreOffice that LibreOffice itself badly needs.

And while you’re pointing to the manifesto, you must also be aware that an online document editor can’t do much in itself, it needs a storage solution to integrate with, and both need to be hosted somewhere. Who wouldn’t want a “LibreOffice Drive”? Who wouldn’t want a hosted service of both? Not TDF, apparently, based on the announcement. That doesn’t seem consistent to me.

Back to who’s going to do the work, I’m sure the magic word “community” will come up many times. (like “the journey that will lead to having an online version by the community and for the community”)
I was here back then and saw how hard it was to find and encourage online contributors, and while I see some eager community members in TDF, I’m not sure how that will translate to contributing to each aspect of the project, from development to documentation. In fact, getting the project out of the attic based on contributor interest wouldn’t have been difficult, if such interest really existed. But if someone has the secret sauce to attracting contributors, they better come forth, because LibreOffice could make use of that already.

Your claim here is that as long as a board member’s actions are towards fulfilling TDF’s mission, they can’t have a conflict of interest. But TDF’s projects are diverse, and it’s possible for a board member to influence prioritizing and spending resources on some parts vs others based on personal interest.

Yet these days “eating” can even get one expelled from the membership by association, how ironic.

1 Like
#50

Working on LibreOffice Online and on LibreOffice Desktop is not mutually exclusive. We have actually just hired two new developers for Desktop, one for scripting, another for Base. Earlier one we hired Dan to work on macOS, which is also a Desktop role. Before we already hired for RTL languages and accessibility. If we now have job openings for two or three developers for Online and mobile, that seems quite balanced to me.

TDF is not a hoster. What we should have done during the Covid lockdown is to make a showcase for some selected schools and universities, to show what is possible with free software. That would have been great advertising for our project, our community, and the ecosystem. Sadly, there was not enough support back then to do it, and I still think this was a huge mistake. It only helped our proprietary competitors, who’ve established themselves even more as a standard for the educational sector since then.

I also don’t remember any past budget proposals that contained items for Online, and I think this was a mistake. TDF could have joined much earlier to fund Online.

Now, however, let’s not cry over spilled milk, but make things better.

Yes, the term “community” does come up, because we are exactly this - an open source and free software community. We need less “me” and “mine” but much more “us” “and ours”. Everyone contributes what they can, everyone has their share. If we all start saying “But I did this” and wants to claim it, a FLOSS community cannot work. If someone wants the credit and exclusivitiy, they are free to do so with their work, but it’s hardly compatible with work in a FLOSS project.

One potential example is to vote on tenders in the budget and in the engineering steering committee, is that correct?

To stay with the picture, what is problematic is endangering the social cafĂ©, eg. by means of putting the charitable status at risk, or misusing the social café’s funds, or by damaging any of the social café’s’ assets.

1 Like
#51

They indeed aren’t mutually exclusive, but the amount of resources TDF has, and can spend on pursuing its goals is limited. Splitting those resources between two projects that each could use many more developers doesn’t seem “balanced” to me. More developers on LibreOffice is great, but in addition it would also be crucial if TDF could focus on restoring and maintaining a healthy and vibrant ecosystem around the project, and I see no intention of that.

I don’t understand how in some comment you keep pointing to the manifesto, and in the other you put up your hands that apparently it’s not up to TDF to fulfill the manifesto in its entirety. In that case perhaps another entity providing a FOSS online office suite that is also available in binary form free of charge also counts as fulfilling the manifesto, freeing up TDF’s resources to pursue other aspects of it.

Yes, the community is crucial, but one really has to look for the substance behind the words, as appealing to a community in words doesn’t equate to having one, most importantly, having contributors who actually do the work. As I wrote above, I was there, and the interest to contribute was marginal. If there’s no interest in the TDF community to contribute to a project, maybe it having found a better home elsewhere by the people growing and maintaining it from the start, while remaining free and open source, is justified.

So, contributors who have no claims of doing anyhting problematic against them should be safe in the foundation, right? Right
?

#52

I was there as well and nobody ever asked me for help in recruiting new contributors. You do realise that at the moment we are in a position where we are constantly at maximum capacity? I’ve had VolunteerMatch paused for like 1.5 years because we get so many contributors from elsewhere. All the talk about GitHub somehow being a better home is just marketing fluff justifying the bad decision to move after the fact.

#53

Neither the lack of volunteer contributors nor GitHub were reasons for the move.

#54

Yes, I know that. In Collabora’s outward communication after the move, however, they were mentioned as a reason.

#55

Hi y’all,

That is, and always was the case, indeed.

What does seem to have changed though - with a board having 3 directors closely affiliated with TDF in charge, which is now substantially over-staying its 2 year term for entirely unclear reasons - is the direct pursuit of (perceived) TDF interests against its community.

What do I mean by this?

TDF’s founders created the project, and then setup the foundation to provide both project and community with a home. TDF was brought into existence to serve the community - nurture it, help it with infrastructure, marketing, travel support, even mentoring and documentation (so newcomers would have an easier start). For more than a decade, boards agreed that some of the most important success metrics were community health and community growth. That also (but never primarily) included nurturing and growing a healthy commercial ecosystem.

With the current board in power, none of the above seem to matter much anymore. Instead, TDF has started to act much more like a product company, prioritizing product (planning to add mobile & online devs) as well as marketing/branding over community support (c.f. travel policy recent changes). Long-time community members unhappy with that approach are being systematically sidelined, muzzled - or worse, kicked out. A vote, that could helpfully gauge support for this new policy, is inexplicably postponed.

What do I conclude?

This is the first time in the history of the project, that the entity setup to serve the LibreOffice community, is violently turning against a substantial part of said community. This has culminated last week in the expulsion of countless contributors from the voting membership. It does appear, that the staff-dominated board is now re-positioning TDF into something very similar to a product company, where community and a healthy commercial ecosystem seem to be either optional, or not a priority - or perhaps even competition that needs to be attacked.

It would be a sad irony, if one of TDF’s founders would be defending that radical change, with references to the original spirit & mission.

Best, Thorsten

1 Like
#56

I think this is a part of the problem, that there seem to be different explanations. I don’t remember any budget proposal for LibreOffice Online back in the day, but several tenders for other areas of the software. If funding was an issue, it could have been raised back then.

An explanation given by a community member in 2021 was that there were some reasons to move away. It was mentioned that the biggest reason it supposedly worked in the end was that it was really hard to get contributors and volunteers when the project was under the TDF umbrella. It was tried hard to attract people, Summer of Code for contribution to Online was mentioned, but it seems there were one or two contributors that way. Since it was moved to GitHub, at least back them, it was mentioned that there would be several commits from random people just because it’s on GitHub.

That gives now several explanations, which makes the whole topic more confusing than needed.

TDF is open for contributions, TDF is open for cooperation, TDF is open for working together in a way that benefits a diverse commercial ecosystem, as well as our contributors and end-users around the globe. Our statutes and our Next Decade Manifesto provide for that.

#57

I know that some like to point at the staff in the board, but this staff has not only abstained even from discussing their own matters, but also has put in a place a stronger CoI policy which binds themselves, it has also given itself a limit of term in the Community Bylaws.

Abstention from discussion was proposed for the first version of the CoI policy, but eventually did not find majority in the board back then.

For 2022, we had a total of about 800.000 € in development-related tenders. That’s 30 tenders for a calendar year, so statistically one tender less than every two weeks.

Doesn’t that make us a product company rather than what happens now?

Also, the idea to sell in the app stores not only for a fee, but “Initial prices to be taken from the last offers the ecosystem licensees had set”, started due to a previous board’s decision.

TDF is paying substantial amount in travel refunds and supports people also with time and work to enable them to travel, as many can confirm. We are changing the period people can apply for, which is in line with what others like SPI or Wikipedia do. What is changed is the application timeline, not the amount of funding.

The idea that TDF would “compete” was brought up elsewhere. I’ve always refused that thinking.

#58

I’m not sure why this particular part is so interesting, I don’t think others would come to a different conclusion after reading Michael’s explanation sent to board-discuss at the time. (of course there are always nuances) And what I wanted to highlight earlier was that TDF members generally weren’t interested in contributing to the project, neither when it was housed within TDF, nor after the move. That’s understandable, it’s for a mostly different target audience.

To quote myself from earlier:

This kept both Collabora’s efforts to continue developing the online code base sustainable, and yielded many features, bug fixes and improvements for LibreOffice, which is probably one of the best case scenarios for both of these projects.

Let me note that these words are in a bit of a bad taste considering how a number of contributors, including several of the most active, prolific, long-standing members were removed from the foundation for no fault of their own, without as much as a word of thanks from TDF for their contributions. That shouldn’t be a way to treat contributors.

And when it comes to cooperating, a few people at TDF deciding at one point they really need to have their own release of the online suite that was carried by Collabora from the start, without much regard to previous agreements or to the long-term impact of the decision on either party doesn’t spell out cooperation to me.

#59

Hi @floeff ,

while you technically respond to my post, you largely answer with whataboutisms.

So I assume there are no actual counter-arguments to my position.

But since you brought up this:

Neither do the term limits apply to the current board - should they seek re-election (“The count of the first term starts from the term that follows the introduction of these community Bylaws” - which is curious, since many of the other rules and regulations where made effective immediately), nor do apparently feel the staff board members bound by the statutory 2-person affiliation limit ("
ensures therefore that a maximum of one third of the members of the Board of Directors, the Membership Committee and the Advisory Board are employed at the same firm, organization or entity or one of its affiliate organizations."), nor the prohibition of staff participation in the board of directors as per BoD rules of procedure.

Instead, the staff-dominated board - hidden inside the new bylaws - has put in place a rule to exempt TDF staff from the above regulation. Curiously, and contradicting your claims of “always abstained” - they all voted for it.

Against that, it seems the new bylaws are not only applied immediately to those targetted frequently here, but even retroactively - using legal disagreements, some of them from almost four years ago.

It is therefore quite amazing, to see the amount of hyperbole directed at others in this forum - while constantly ignoring & glossing over own rule-breaking and power games by the current clique.

Best, Thorsten

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