Dear Thorsten, Emiliano, board, dear TDF members, all,
first of all, I'd like to state for those that are not into the current
status quo that this proposal will mainly affect the "Online" project at
TDF's infra.
I have to say, as a contributor of LibreOffice Online and a member of
TDF, this proposal makes me completely unhappy, although it was clear
since day 1 of Collabora forking Online that some decision had to be
taken on our end.
I have already said this many times but I want to repeat it: it has to
be clear (and hopefully stated by legal contracts) to the companies
working in the LibreOffice ecosystem that they cannot wake up one day
and bring their development outside the LibreOffice project. They cannot
stay with one foot inside the ecosystem, contributing to it, and with
the other one bringing their development effort outside. This is
something the next board should focus on.
Getting to this specific situation, Jan 'Kendy' Holešovský, in the last
Q+A session for the next BoD, stated that “it was really hard for us
[Collabora] to get contributors and volunteers under the TDF umbrella…
and we tried hard […] now that we’re on GitHub we get several commits
from random people just because it’s on GitHub” [1]. Kendy didn’t bring
any data supporting this thesis but – for the sake of the argument –
assume he’s true. Shouldn’t this have been a concern for the whole
foundation, and not only for Collabora? It’s the foundation scope to
bring new developers in. If GitHub can magically attract developers,
also TDF, from my point of view, should move there.
There are indeed a few concerns I have to bring: have you ever wondered
why the Nextcloud Server project on GitHub has 1.6k open issues? Why do
they need so many tags, bots, and PEOPLE, employees that spend their
time closing useless issues that are used as support requests?
What I’m trying to say is that a wider audience also comes with
considerable disadvantages.
In his speech, Kendy also mentions that “we [Collabora] love
LibreOffice”. I am sure that what he says is true, which is precisely
why he (with the whole Collabora team) could help us understand why they
renamed lool (LibreOffice Online) to cool (Collabora Online) also in the
source code [2], removed the “This file is part of the LibreOffice
project.” statementfrom the headers of the source [3] and changed the
variable names [4].
In conclusion, I would like to emphasise the fact that I’m completely
unhappy with the “attic” proposal as a solution for the Online situation
and hope we can all work together to allow TDF to still consider Online
a part of the LibreOffice suite.
All the best,
Marco
[1] 1:40:00 and on, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YL1NnGvbZT8
[2]
https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online/commit/f07ff8c7e0754babe9819163fb0edeacac326caf
https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online/commit/ec8f28d75c62f2ea1e0bc147ac80b68a52336932
[3]
https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online/commit/0002fdfd6c21655bcba3fb69b291af4d3801ad79
[4]
https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online/commit/34b8ff08f6c417acbf62c256f0b9371d725c4e54
Il 17/12/21 12:16, Thorsten Behrens ha scritto:
> Dear board, dear TDF members, all,
>
> as mentioned a few times during board calls, Emiliano and me have been
> drafting a proposal what to do with no-longer-active projects at TDF.
>
> Here's the draft we're both happy with:
>
> -%<--
>
> ## Introduction
>
> It can happen, with a huge project like LibreOffice, that parts
> of the project worked on by the community will become obsolete or
> superseded by other projects. The following proposal will cope
> with the need to let the code (and/or other form of text related
> to the code) to be publicly available, while setting the correct
> expectations around its availability, suitability for a
> production environment, quality and security.
>
> ## What is the “attic”?
>
> The “attic” is a special area of TDF infrastructure where part of
> the code/documentation/translations can be parked, that is not
> anymore actively developed. This will help setting the correct
> expectations on its status of development, while not losing its
> fundamental trait of being open source (so its code must be
> publicly available).
>
> In the present proposal, the “attic” would be a single host
> inside TDF infrastructure, available in HTTP/HTTPS protocols,
> responding to a URI similar to:
> https://attic.documentfoundation.org
>
> ## Specificity of the “attic”
>
> This “attic” space will have, at minimum, the following characteristics:
>
> • It is supported by git – the well known CVS developed by Linus
> Torvalds initally and used to share the sources of the Linux
> kernel. Being supported by git will ease the forking of the code
> contained there;
>
> • Any repositories inside it will be made “read only”, so no “push” or
> “pull request” mechanisms will be available: this allows changes to
> the code to be
