Hi Laszlo,
thanks for your engagement. Just a few notes as I've been directly
involved in proposing to get the community to be more involved with LOOL
and to enjoy it's use while trying to agree with the major code
contributor a mutually beneficial way to do it.
On 24/06/2022 17:27, laszlo.nem...@documentfoundation.org wrote:
We need not only a security warning, but clear information that the
recommended versions of LOOL are still CODE and Collabora Online
(LibreOffice Technology (TM)).
I respectfully disagree.
We can surely promote the fact that there are members of the ecosystem
that provide support and other services that TDF does not provide for
LibreOffice Community on the desktop but then that's it.
As we are not, yet, delivering to our community LOOL Community we don't
have a supported edition to recommend. CODE and Collabora Online are
just other products from a member of the ecosystem that at present have
no TDF's hosted community version to refer to.
So at the end we cannot recommend an enterprise version of something we
do not publish.
A few months ago my corporate client wasted time and money because
they didn't notice on the
TDF site that LOOL is not actively developed.
It was a very unfortunate outcome and but it's a long time that we
promote the fact that corporate clients should seek adequate support
services.
LOOL has been frozen, by a split board vote, due to the unilateral
decision of the major code contributor to fork and not contribute back.
You will find in the board-discuss archives several threads that try to
explain how hard the board worked to provide more support to members of
the ecosystem and to find a mutually beneficial agreement but once we
made good our side the agreement the other side just walked out.
Thanks to the helpfulness of employees of
Collabora Productivity, now they can test its fork with an up-to-date
LibreOffice in their intranet, and
started to contribute back to CODE (they have already been one of the
biggest contributors
of LibreOffice Desktop).
It is good that your corporate client can enjoy the benefits of the
combined efforts in terms of code and lots of contributions from TDF and
the wider community.
Your corporate client made anyway the right choice as, unless they have
a very capable team able to fix bugs and contribute back to a community
project as LOOL was, then they should get support from other parties.
Why do we need to emphasize that CODE/Collabora Online are the
recommended versions (by TDF, too:
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/LibreOffice_Online#Current_Status)?
Thank you for pointing to that page that has been heavily edited since
last time I looked at it.
It now seems to be an advertising page for products for which TDF
doesn't have a community counterpart so I wonder if those changes
shouldn't be reverted.
Not only because LOOL was the idea and for the most part, product of
Collabora Productivity,
but because the original core LOOL developers still work for Collabora
in the spirit of the
free software: CODE is the only actively developed version of LOOL,
and this is the only maintained
version which contributes back to LibreOffice actively.
LOOL has been "temporarily" frozen for a long time so or we take a
decision to bring it back to life, following suggestions that arrived in
the past few days, or there is no LOOL and as a consequence no
alternatives to point to.
OSSII seems to show that it is possible to have both a commercial and a
community version, a bit of a shame that we couldn't find an agreement
with a major contributor of LOOL. If it will be possible to create clear
rules for cooperation, which might also include synergies to improve CJK
handling, then that could be a commercial offering available for
enterprise users. Needs more investigation.
Andreas options also requires investigation as it seems to involve
backporting of an Open Source project managed by a commercial provider.
It would be great to see if that commercial provider is also willing to
cooperate under clear rules so that we can refer back to their products
for enterprise users.
If after 12 months we don't see much activity then we could be certain
that the community is not really interested in working on LOOL.
It would be great to know if others have other
takes/options/alternatives on this subject.
I'm sure, the potential corporate contributors will prefer
CODE/Collabora Online, so it's really important to inform them (and
every LibreOffice users) correctly, like in
https://collaboraonline.github.io/post/faq/.
Corporate contributors surely prefer to have their
projects/products/services promoted, which TDF does for version that it
hosts, but CODE/COOL do not relate to LOOL any more so it should be up
to them to market their own products and services.
Until we revive LOOL and we (re)create a community around it we should
not point to commercial versions of it.
As CODE/Collabora Online are LibreOffice Technology (TM), and for the
healthy long-term LibreOffice development, I would like to see more
contribution with Collabora Productivity.
We should actually evaluate if those product should use the "LibreOffice
Technology" branding.
When Collabora Productivity moved LOOL's code from TDF's repositories to
GitHub the first thing that it has done was to remove the header "This
file is part of the LibreOffice project" from all the files.
Subsequently even the variables names have been renamed from LOOL to COOL.
This, and other changes, show the intention of removing any indication
that the product COOL actually originated from LOOL and every indication
that the project was a result of a common effort which included TDF and
the wider community.
In my opinion, as LOOL was, CODE is still the key for the survival of
LibreOffice.
CODE is now a product fully managed by a commercial contributor that
decided to sever all links from TDF in regards to that product so unless
they finally agree to join forces again and backport the code to LOOL
there is nothing much we can do about their product.
On-line drafting tools are surely useful for many uses and users but
there are still billions of people that cannot/do not want to rely on
Cloud services to edit their documents so LibreOffice desktop with lots
more features and better usability will still be very much relevant for
many years to come.
LOOL, and products based on it, is just one of the ways to offer on-line
collaborative editing so we may also want to investigate other ways to
make LibreOffice available on-line.
In the spirit of a successful free software contribution, respecting
the decision of Collabora Productivity, TDF must help CODE
development, as much as possible, for the sake of LibreOffice!
Respect is a two way street, TDF kept its promises but the other party
decided to fork regardless.
TDF invests in other Open Source software as it's the right thing to do
and we could evaluate joint investments if we had a LOOL to give to our
community but this time the rules of engagement should be very clear so
that the third party does not walk away after having benefited from
TDF's and our community's investments.
As a first step, we shouldn't hijack future CODE users and as
described above, future (and recent) LibreOffice users and
contributors with false hopes and misleading information.
When I accused people of creating false hopes and providing misleading
information in regards to LOOL, that pushed me to propose to have a
properly structured offering in collaboration with the major code
contributor, I have done it with lots of supporting evidence.
You will find all the evidence in the board-discuss archives, in public
board meeting minutes and, as now you are a board member and you should
take decisions based on objective data, in board email exchanges that
I'm very happy to share with you.
I do understand that you are a new member of the board and if you check
your emails you will notice that one of my first recommendations was not
to limit your choices on what you have been told but to verify things by
looking for the relevant objective data or you risk being mislead by
narratives that could be slightly biased.
Best regards,
László
Ciao
Paolo
Ciao
Paolo
On 21/06/2022 21:14, Andreas Mantke wrote:
Hi all,
only a short info that I'm currently working on an update of the LOOL
source code with the latest patches. Because I have an issue with my
newly bought hardware I had to migrate my environment (etc.) to another
hardware (will need some hours of spare time). Thus I was not able to
finish my work during this week.
If someone wants to join me, feel free to send me an email.
Once the necessary bits are done, I'll come back and try to make a
proposal for the further process to get LOOL back under the TDF
umbrella.
Regards,
Andreas
Am 21.06.22 um 14:15 schrieb Paolo Vecchi:
Hi all,
just a heads up in case the community would like to come up with
proposals in regards to LibreOffice On-Line.
As you might be aware LOOL's repository has been frozen since the
major code contributor decided to move it to GitHub and not contribute
back to TDF's repository.
At the time there has been a debate about it but then nothing
actionable seems to have been proposed by the community since then.
Recently an ex-member of the ESC proposed to the ESC to archive LOOL
[0] and during the following ESC meeting no concerns were expressed
for doing so [1].
The "Attic Policy" [2], that has been written to archive obsolete
projects, states that the Board will need to vote on the archival
process to confirm ESC's choice.
It is likely that the board will need to vote on it soon so if the
community would like to do something with LOOL there might be a small
window of opportunity to have your preferences on what to do with it
heard.
If nobody comes along proposing to look after it and update if so that
it could be brought back into an usable form for the community then
the board might have to vote for having LOOL archived.
Ciao
Paolo
[0]
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/2022-June/088982.html
[1]
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/2022-June/089018.html
[2] https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/Policies/Attic
-- ## Free Software Advocate
## Plone add-on developer
## My blog: http://www.amantke.de/blog
--
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