Hi Marco, On 09/01/2022 16:05, Marco Marinello wrote: > I also would like to emphasize the fact that, in the current situation, > building a competing product starting from the frozen repo with no > companies working on it and the one on GitHub 1 year ahead, would just > be impossible.
Thank you for recognising the importance of companies working on the project to do much of the heavy lifting too; that's appreciated. I wonder though if building a competing product is a useful goal for TDF to consider. I would hope instead that TDF can collaborate well with others to drive its mission. Every organization has strengths and weaknesses, things it can, and cannot do - and by working together to complement each other - much can be achieved that would be otherwise impossible. Beyond that I see your proposal as fundamentally the same as previous approaches here - which I mentally group under the heading "lets de-fund the developers". As you know TDF previously had an agreed[1] position around online. It was pretty ugly and displeasing to many; no-one was very happy with it. Confidence in the durability of this compromise broke down completely with the results we know. The up-side of that is that now - I believe we have moved to a new and better model for everyone: Now we have clear credit for the work via clean branding. We use Italo's clever framing to credit via the LibreOffice Technology that we build on and those that write it. The documentation you need is open. There are no user-limits in the binaries so they can be used in schools for free etc. We didn't break the economics ie. we still empower "makers" over "takers", which continues to fund work on the LibreOffice core. To top it all we can remove a massive source of contention. Re-opening the can of worms as you suggest doesn't look constructive. And I don't believe it is necessary. If competing organizations want to re-build COOL and re-brand it or deploy it themselves, that is fine - it is FLOSS - people already do that left and right. Lending them our brand to promote competing products, without the expense of them having to contribute anything significant, and without any track record of doing so would be unfortunate. As is - it risks use the LibreOffice brand to make it socially acceptable to set the price-point at zero for collaborative online office suites, and (I assume) remove the nudges to get support and services. I hope you can see that just de-funds the developers. My ecosystem paper[2] tries to explain the basics: -> marketing/branding -> leads -> sales -> investment -> ... where a chunk of such investment goes back into the LibreOffice core that is foundational to TDF's mission; as well as marketing to go around the next virtuous circle. We have lots of hard data that shows the LibreOffice brand will crush the ecosystem's brands in a side-by-side comparison. So at one level you're right - it would be ideal in some sense to use the LibreOffice brand in a fair way to drive leads and sales to fund development - however this has been repeatedly shown to be structurally impossible for TDF. Quite probably that is a feature not bug for a non-profit. So here we are. Who benefits from a proposal to remove the author's names and credit from the brand of the product, and to leverage the community's brand to drive competing products ? TDF's previous approach had a message: "This is an un-supported version of LibreOffice. To avoid the impression it is suitable for deployment in enterprises, this message appears when more than 10 users or 20 connections are in use concurrently." I believe we can only harm the LibreOffice brand by blessing services that are not effectively supported - ie. backed by competent (certified) developers. If someone wants that - they should build it and use their own brand (as they always could). I associate (perhaps unfairly) the suggestion for TDF to make this easy to do with those who want to promote their own hosting services with a zero-price complement. Fostering the development of Free software is tough, with everyone from Sun/Oracle onwards struggling with that. As of today we have no big 'strategic' investor. If we want to create more good Free software we need to care about the side-effects of otherwise well-intentioned actions. The thought that TDF could first de-fund and then hire developers to do the work itself is interesting, but is fundamentally a negative-sum-game. We have a positive sum option: to keep the wider ecosystem around -and- spend that money to improve the software (for example by hiring extra mentors or tendering). Sadly, the distraction from this topic has really impaired the board's ability to do good things around the LibreOffice Technology and our desktop product. Perhaps I've not persuaded you, but I think the proposal while no doubt well-meaning is self-defeating for TDF, for LibreOffice, and for its contributing ecoystem. I also agree with Thorsten that the stories about achieving market dominance during the COVID crisis with this approach are impossibly naive. From a hardware provision perspective alone - being backed by a giant monopoly (which we are not), really helps to front the Eur 10's of millions of infrastructure cost needed to provide a large-scale free service. Also - I expect that selling users' private data or insights gleaned from it (something TDF would never do) also gives a significant cost edge against us. On the plus side - the tragic COVID crisis has encouraged a number of organizations to choose to move to LibreOffice Technology. Many have done that in a sustainable way - I hope their financial contribution and positive experiences of support will continue for many years improving LibreOffice to everyone's benefit. Hopefully that is something we can mutually celebrate, Regards, Michael. [1] - https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/ eg. "why is this un-supported?" - this page forms the only substantial agreement I can see on the topic. [2] - https://people.gnome.org/~michael/data/vendor-neutral-marketing.html -- michael.me...@collabora.com <><, GM Collabora Productivity Hangout: mejme...@gmail.com, Skype: mmeeks (M) +44 7795 666 147 - timezone usually UK / Europe -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy