Hi Tuomas, On 13/05/2022 18:45, Tuomas Hietala wrote:
Hello Paolo,Thank you for working on this proposal. As a member of TDF, I fully agree that more investment is needed in RTL, CTL and CJK in order to make LibreOffice useful for the next two billion or so people and potentially grow the community of contributors. I'd imagine this could also open up new business opportunities for the commercial ecosystem once the investment from TDF has brought LO to a more usable state in the currently neglected languages.
Thanks for the kind words and for summarising some of the reasons why we should invest in in-house developers.
With regard to accessibility, I'd like to bring up the question of regulation. In the future, it might very well become mandatory for most public sector organisations globally to only procure software meeting accessibility requirements (and in the case of office suites, producing accessible documents). Even without such regulations, many organisations will probably choose accessible software, if possible.
You are absolutely right on this.
I agree with others who have said that MSO interoperability is not a neglected area. The commercial ecosystem is very active there. I also don't think TDF should be spending its resources on chasing compatiblity with proprietary formats as long as LO still has catching up to do with the latest version of ODF. While MSO compatiblity is important for many people (including myself), in many cases, such as in education, it might not be needed at all, whereas accessibility would be very welcome. Not to mention supporting the local language properly.
I see your point but we are still in a situation where one of the objections that holds back some upgrades to LibreOffice is that people have to deal with files created with an everchanging proprietary format of a de-facto monopolist. It's good that the commercial ecosystem works on it and keeps doing a great job by serving the enterprise customers that are having to deal the most with OOXML files.
TDF invests a lot on the ODF format and slowly some governments are choosing it as their standard file format. There have been calls for European Institutions to start using ODF as their standard file format and I'm pleased to see that the European Commission, among others, accepts and publishes also ODF files. When the OOXML variant used in the other office suite will finally be recognised as not being a valid Open Standard then we'll see a big positive change in all the public sector and by consequence in the private sector. Hopefully in the not too distant future we will look at OOXML as a thing of the past and keep an import filter in LibreOffice just in case some discover some old files that need to be upgraded to a proper Open Standard format like ODF ;-)
So, in my opinion, keeping up with OOXML changes shouldn't be a primary focus for the in-house developers, unless they find some quick fixes for some issues or old bugs that aren't getting the right amount of attention by others, and I totally agree that languages and accessibility should be given priority over this.
Best regards, Tuomas Hietala
Thanks again for your contributions. Ciao Paolo
Paolo Vecchi kirjoitti 12.5.2022 15:29:Hi all, after receiving quite a few comments and suggestions it seems like is time to publish what, hopefully, is the final version of the proposal to add 2 in-house developers to TDF's team: https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/sfJeNq7H9GS8YPe The most significant changes have been made in the Focus Areas where the recommendations from Michael Weghorn and lmari Lauhakangas (thanks to both!) have been merged in the text, relevant links have been put in the footer to make the proposal more readable and additional explanations have been provided.Other minor changes have been applied to the text throughout the document.I have received no additional constructive feedback from the board since the last published version so I assume that the proposal will be promptly approved as a new strategic project and the team will be kindly asked to prepare the job descriptions shortly after. Thank you all for your contributions! Ciao Paolo
-- Paolo Vecchi - Member of the Board of Directors The Document Foundation, Kurfürstendamm 188, 10707 Berlin, DE Gemeinnützige rechtsfähige Stiftung des bürgerlichen Rechts Legal details: https://www.documentfoundation.org/imprint
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