[board-discuss] FLOSS software money ecosystem, in general [was Personal: and software freedom.]
On Fri, Jul 10, 2020 at 03:40:05AM +0200, Lionel Élie Mamane wrote: > On Thu, Jul 09, 2020 at 02:28:51PM +0100, Michael Meeks wrote: >> Many things are legal, but many fewer are moral. >> Steering people towards things that help to build the >> community and codebase is extremely useful. >> it is also an industry standard for successful ecosystems: >> Fedora vs. RedHat Enterprise Linux vs. CentOS. >> or >> SUSE vs openSUSE > Redhat will sell you a yearly subscription for a single workstation, > as low as 180 USD. So will SuSE for 32 GBP. > Closer to home, Microsoft will sell you a single licence for their > office suite, either as "perpetual" or "subscription" starting at 5 > USD/month or 8.25 USD/month (...). INTRODUCTION In general economic terms, what all these systems do, and what the LibreOffice ecosystem is trying to achieve, is to spread the cost of making, maintaining and improving LibreOffice over multiple users. The spread is (nearly) never equal; all those systems extract more money from some users than others. Typically business users, or different markets: The exact same software for business will "cost" more for "business use" than for "family use", or more in "high cost of living" countries that in "low cost of living" countries. For most software, no single user will fund it all. While it may work for some FLOSS software (where "developer" and "user" are very overlapping categories), the pure, money-less, model of "the commons", where everyone/most contributes 1 to 10 units of development work, and everyone gets back the result 1000 units of development work, does not work for LibreOffice. So the need for a money flow. I'm going to speak about individuals and small teams (SMEs etc); I do understand this is not the short-term focus now, but it what I know and it is close to my heart; most of a country's GDP is made by SMEs; that's where, in the aggregate, most of the money is, but it is there by many small streams, not as a few big rivers (English doesn't use a different name for small and big (Rhine or Danube size) rivers, so the French expression doesn't translate well...). INDIVIDUALS AND SMEs: (half-)voluntary == I want to believe in the goodness of humanity, and that a non-negligible percentage (suitably educated / made aware of) people and SMEs will voluntarily, or half-voluntarily, contribute in money when not contributing otherwise, if and when that is easy and low in non-monetary costs (such as _time_ and effort to jump through the hoops to do it, and to figure out to whom send money and how). This can only work for "user visible" software (it will not work for OpenSSL), but LibreOffice is highly "user visible" (funding OpenSSL in that model requires that other FLOSS developers relying on OpenSSL and that get money for their FLOSS "voluntarily" send some money to OpenSSL). The disadvantage that LibreOffice has is that, except for the TDF, which doesn't fund development to a sustainable level, it doesn't have an easily identifiable "target". The "on the Apple/Microsoft stores" angle being pursued is more or less part of this "aim for the small guys" thing. I've already made these points abundantly clear in previous emails, so I'll stop that here. INDIVIDUALS AND SMEs: directly useful services == Another angle, maybe more "real world realistic", is to offer directly useful services, in small chunks so that the "sticker price" is low. Individual support -- I'm convinced that many people would pay for personal "user support", here and now, at an appropriate price point; even if the answer to their question is teaching them to use a particular feature of the software. In the 1990s, pay-per-seat closed source software from anyone smaller than Microsoft actually included that; it was called a "hotline". You phoned and you were helped. Games had that, WordPerfect had that. I think even Microsoft included some of that at the time, very limited in scope and time, and useless in terms of competence of the person one got on the phone; I think Apple actually sold that service as a subscription... and didn't Microsoft do it at some "pay per incident" rate which seemed not worth for me as a teenager, but would make sense for an SME, or some individual doing their family's birthday party invitations or such? I think it was something like 30 USD to 50 USD per incident at the time, so with inflation maybe closer to 75 to 100 EUR/USD/GBP now? Either the development companies double as "user support" companies (yes, get in another line of business... but they have unique credibility to sell such services, especially if they escalate thorny cases to the developers... for some capped percentage of their time?), or the "user support" companies (and migration companies, etc) "voluntarily" send money to the developer companies. Maybe that can be packaged
Re: [board-discuss] New Version of Strategic Marcom Plan
Hi Am 15.07.20 um 16:05 schrieb Italo Vignoli: > A new version of the strategic marcom plan has been uploaded to > Nextcloud: https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/4pLtn9xn76BkxFK Very much improved indeed :-) Two minor naggings: Slide 3 (in regard to 4) maybe better (?) "The Document Foundation is a charitable organization, and as such is not supposed to release commercial software /as well as to fund programming of software/. Slide 28 What is the surplus of the sum of "volonteers" and "ecosystem" to form the "community"? Users? Takers? And my "ceterum censeo..." Slide 49/50 This is why I and some others propose "" set as TDB - so we get "LibreOffice" and "LibreOffice Enterprise,[brought to you by XYZ]" as a result. This avoids all of the possible negative connotations each of the proposed "additions" to the build distributed by TDF brings. And allows the intended discrimination as well: Basically we say there is a "LibreOffice" (vanilla) and "LibreOffice with benefits" (Enterprise,...) - and that's exactly what we want to tell the people, isn't it? -- Mit freundlichen Grüßen Uwe Altmann -- 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
Re: [tdf-members] [board-discuss] Re: Personal: and software freedom.
Le 2020-07-14 08:09, Cor Nouws a écrit : == Postings on this list are considered private. Please do not share outside this circle. For replies to this e-mail and to engage in the discussion, please use the tdf-internal mailing list. The tdf-members mailing list is announce-only. == Hi Lionel, *, Lionel Élie Mamane wrote on 13/07/2020 18:05: On Sat, Jul 11, 2020 at 12:04:41PM +0100, Michael Meeks wrote: Which is a completely fair comment too. It's unclear of course if eg. a Community Edition will yield any significant traction, and certainly encouraging enterprises of a certain size to contribute (because others might swamp the ecosystem with transaction & setup costs) is hard to do in a single word =) Depending on where you want to put the threshold: LibreOffice Personal & Home Office LibreOffice Personal & Small Business LibreOffice Personal & SME Maybe even better: LibreOffice Personal & Small Teams Or replace "Personal" by "Family" or "Home" or "Private" in any of the above. I like the "& Small Teams" version. It refers to a group of students collaborating on homework, to a small non-profit, to a small business, etc. I'm very positive about the words "Personal & Small Teams". Since 'teams' for some reason is popular, it can also easily generate extra traction for LibreOffice. Cheers, Cor --- agree with LibreOffice Personal & Small Teams, easily trace group and team work, cheers -- 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
Re: [tdf-members] [board-discuss] Re: Personal: and software freedom.
Le 2020-07-13 17:26, Thorsten Behrens a écrit : == Postings on this list are considered private. Please do not share outside this circle. For replies to this e-mail and to engage in the discussion, please use the tdf-internal mailing list. The tdf-members mailing list is announce-only. == Lionel Élie Mamane wrote: My point is: do not send a message that people should pay (try to create the demand), if the offer is not there. I agree. But I'm pretty sure that unmet demand is a problem worth having in the ecosystem, and we're happy to meet it. ;) Cheers, -- Thorsten indeed, creating the demand makes it possible to immediately assess the real need of the users, people are often very skeptical as soon as they hear that it pays; I agree with Elie. cheers, -- 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
Re: [board-discuss] Personal Edition label and define is wrong.
Hi, On Thu, Jul 16, 2020 at 10:53:54AM +0200, Thorsten Behrens wrote: > What would be missing - as a value-proposition, or via TDF marketing - > to make it compelling for enterprises not to deploy LibreOffice > without support? I think TDF marketing should provide guidance on how running a successful major LibreOffice deployment without external support is set up, and what benefits this yields. This could be something along the lines of the following bulletpoints: To be successful: * You need approximately 1 experienced C++ developer per 2000 seats. * You need at least one certified core developer to onboard the others into the upstream project. * You need approximately one QA person per five developers. * Depending on circumstances, you might need ressources to support with documentation, translation and training. The benefits are -- if you have the experience and resources of leading such a team -- that you have a local team that will learn about your specific requirements, can solve the issues and even might spot and fix them before they impact your workforce. I would assume Munich (just before it was killed politically) is the most successful example of that and starting from scratch, it took them approximately a decade to get there. So anyone considering a major deployment of LibreOffice should wonder: * Does the experience of running such software development teams exist inhouse? * Does the entity have a decade to get the deployment and support team to run smoothly? If not, however, that is not the end of the story: In those cases there are ecosystem companies that are able to significantly help speeding up the bootstrap, so you dont have to wait ten years to get your return on investment. Best, Bjoern -- 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
Re: [board-discuss] Drafting "Tender for implementing support for a dedicated, built-in UNO object,inspection tool (Xray-built-in debugger)"
Hi Lothar, > a) (Completeness of the specification) Isn't it appropriate to assign the > right Version of LibO and the UNO API to it, at least what is the version > (or with what LibO Version delivered) the "WatchCode"-Implementation should > be used for the UI work? Which version of the XRAY and MRI tool is here > relevant, at least say "the latest" with a hint for a source for them. I think the idea is that the work is developed on LibreOffice master, so it gets released in the next major version after the work is done. This is how all previous tenders were delivered. The result is part of LibreOffice itself, so specifying a LibreOffice version adds no value. XRAY and MRI are just examples of what's possible for an inspection tool, so I would consider their version as not relevant. > b) (Feature request) I miss this great feature to have a code autocompletion, > for example in VS you can set the "." as referenciator and that get the > possible services or DOM Tree alternatives or... and also complete the > parameter part when hitting return (or is this meant with the Copy & Paste > feature?) My understanding is that we currently provide no good autocompletion APIs, and such an inspection tool would build on top of it. If you add autocompletion to the scope, it can easily double the amount of needed work, so I would carefully avoid that. > c) (Completeness of the specification) It is mentioned, that "everywhere > where possible" to lean on automatic testing. Well, to be honest, this is a > huge field. Shouldn't we specify this a little bit more in detail, what we do > expect here? Are there automatic test tools we are already using which > we want to see or for which we want to have the automation scripts or ...? I believe the current wording was used for previous tenders already, without problems. The idea is that whenever a sub-task is done (something gets fixed or implemented), it should be considered to add a test for it. It's hard to specify this more than this: if you add quantity requirements, then it's easy to add a lot of useless tests, and it's not easy to measure test quality with numbers. :-) I would prefer a reasonable amount of good tests, rather than a lot of useless tests. The effort needed to add tests is also different for each & every case: sometimes it's a shame that a test is not added, sometimes it would be a heroic effort to cover some behavior with an automated test. > d) (Details in the proposal) I would also expect a detailed estimation in the > sense that it is not just a figure but at least one for each mentioned > feature in the mandatory as well as in the optional part. If they are > proposing other features (not mentioned here) they should do it as well with a > figure for it. Is it mentioned anywhere? It is possible it's hard to compare proposals if the proposals have optional features. One consistent way is to asssume you order / not order everything optional. I imagine if the proposal is detailed enough, there is a brief description of each sub-task, how it would be done -- then you can get the impression at the end that the bidder did their homework, and the number at the bottom of the offer is not just a ball-park. Regards, Miklos -- 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
Re: [board-discuss] Personal Edition label and define is wrong.
Hi Peter, Michael, Michael Meeks wrote: > > Only from ecosystem members this means if this equals must pay someone > > to get this version lot of my deployments in different businesses of > > Libreoffice would never have happened.Yes I can see those wanting > > to make the "LibreOffice Enterprise" wanting as many paying customers > > as possible. > > It seem you deploy LibreOffice in lots of businesses; I'm interested in > your experience of the economics of that. > Me too - as my experience is indeed, it tends to be hard to convince enterprises later on, that FLOSS does not mean zero-cost - if your entry is via the gratis door. What would be missing - as a value-proposition, or via TDF marketing - to make it compelling for enterprises not to deploy LibreOffice without support? Cheers, -- Thorsten signature.asc Description: PGP signature
[board-discuss] Drafting "Tender to finish transition of LibreOffice to ODF 1.3 (ODF 1.3 delta)"
Hello, one of the approved [1] tenders is the Tender to finish transition of LibreOffice to ODF 1.3 (ODF 1.3 delta) I would like to especially thank Regina Henschel for her amazing volunteer work on both this and the previous ODF 1.3 tender - it's a true pleasure to work with you! :) The board would like to work together in public with all of you on this tender before it gets officially published. The current draft is therefore shared at https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/59Nd4Tdn4Emkcaz The shared folder consists of two files: * ODF 1.3 delta Tender.odt This is the very first draft of the tender, currently less or more our tender template that we will fill with content. * ODF 1.3 delta Items.ods This spreadsheet created by Regina (thanks so much!) lists all the tasks and items for this tender. The column "Complexity/Comments (notes taken on the phone)" is the notes I took while being on the phone with Regina - let me know any glitches or inaccuracies of mine you find. The board is happy to get your feedback and proposals. We'd like to discuss this in the board call after the next, i.e. on Friday, July 31, at 1300 Berlin time. Please send your feedback to the public board-discuss@documentfoundation.org mailing list. Those with a conflict of interest (i.e. potential bidders) will be excluded from the point on the tender is published and evaluated. Looking forward to your feedback, and thanks again to Regina! Florian [1] https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/msg04477.html -- Florian Effenberger, Executive Director (Geschäftsführer) Tel: +49 30 5557992-50 | Mail: flo...@documentfoundation.org The Document Foundation, Kurfürstendamm 188, 10707 Berlin, DE Gemeinnützige rechtsfähige Stiftung des bürgerlichen Rechts Legal details: https://www.documentfoundation.org/imprint -- 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
