[board-discuss] Re: [VOTE] Start audio-recording TDF board calls again, for better minuting
Hi, +1 Best regards, László On 2023-03-02 21:08, Thorsten Behrens wrote: Dear board, as discussed during the last board call, it would help with producing better-quality minutes, if audio recordings would be available. Motion: ask Infra to setup a Jitsi recording facility for the TDF board room as soon as possible. Recordings should be made available only to the board, in particular when private or sensitive topics are discussed. This vote runs for 72h, please give your [+1/-1/0] by answering to this email. Cheers, -- Thorsten -- László Németh, 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 -- 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] [VOTE] New proposal for hiring in-house developers.
Dear Cor, board and TDF members, On 2022-12-02 09:24, Cor Nouws wrote: Dear people, Thanks for the constructive feedback on the proposal. Various changes applied, I now call a vote for the resolution below. Your response within 72 hours from now is much appreciated. Cheers, Cor -%<-- ## TDF Developer Hiring Resolution 2022 "Whereas, - with TDF stewarding, among other things, a well-working symbiosis of various companies and volunteer developers inside of the LibreOffice community; - given that in the current situation, there are certain areas where extra developers can add value with additional activities, that complement the existing contributions; - with this being an ongoing need; Therefore the board resolves that: - TDF will seek to hire a developer(s); - who will report to the ED as a regular team member, and consult weekly with the ESC, which will oversee the technical direction of the work; - who will work in such a way, that both volunteer and ecosystem peers regard them as helpful, supportive and complementing their own work; - for whom as the initial areas of work, the board identifies improving RTL/CTL writing support and accessibility for LibreOffice; as well as mentoring new volunteers in these specific areas. After that, depending on skills available, Writer tables, Base, general regression fixing, Draw, and Math are the next focus areas; - thus, there will be two job postings, with requirements matching the initial focus areas listed above, and one or two developers will be hired initially; - after 6, and after 9 months following the developers starting their work, the board will do an assessment of the situation and results. Requirements for the candidates: * Very good C++ development skills; * Proven experience with Accessibility and/or RTL/CTL, additional CJK experience is a strong plus; * Love for open source; * Team players; * Experience with LibreOffice development is a plus. Footnote: for a requirements analysis on the need for hiring developers, please refer to information on the pages 3-8 of the abandoned dev proposal: https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/qofn646Jg6bmPYB " -%<-- +1 Many thanks to all the contributors of this and the abandoned proposals! Best regards, László P.S. I have a While I understand Thanks to Kendy and Paolo, and all of the contributors, who to As a participant of the strategy item "double developers" I encourage everyone to do so 'm very glad of the Let me I'm sure, that many thanks for the techincal excellence Cor Nouws wrote on 28/11/2022 10:58: Hi all, As promised. After the previous draft text ended up in a dead-end, with apparently no compromise possible, it is time for a fresh start to get developers hired. The initial discussion was valuable and also informing this proposal. With the following, we suggest a new proposal, brief and positive, that makes clear where we stand, building on trust in the community, and leaves it to the board to pragmatically act, based on their task and responsibility to try to do the best thing for the foundation. Your feedback is much appreciated. Thanks, Cor -%<-- ## TDF Developer Hiring Resolution 2022 "Whereas, - with TDF stewarding, among other things, a well-working symbiosis of various companies and volunteer developers inside of the LibreOffice community; - given that in the current situation, there are certain areas where extra developers can add value with additional activities, that complement the existing contributions; - with this being an ongoing need; Therefore the board resolves that: - TDF will seek to hire a developer(s) reporting to the ESC; - who will work in such a way, that both volunteer and ecosystem peers regard them as helpful, supportive and complementing their own work; - for whom as the initial areas of work, the board identifies improving RTL/CTL writing support and accessibility for LibreOffice core; as well as mentoring new volunteers in these specific areas. After that, depending on skills available, Writer tables, Base, general regression fixing, Draw, and Math are the next focus areas; - thus, there will be two job postings, with requirements matching the initial focus areas listed above, and one or two developers will be hired initially; - after 6, and after 9 months following the developers starting their work, the board will do an assessment of the situation and results. Requirements for the candidates: * Very good C++ development skills; * Proven experience with Accessibility and/or RTL/CTL, additional CJK experience is a strong plus; * Love for open source; * Team players; * Experience with LibreOffice development is a plus. Footnote: for a requ
[board-discuss] Changes in corporate affiliation
Dear Members, I would like to change my corporate affiliation to Csevej Bt., Hungary. Csevej Bt. is my free software company, working on e.g. LibreOffice language technology including Hunspell, libnumbertext, LightProof, libhyphen; LibreLogo etc., recently finishing libnumbertext integration by adding default “spell out” number and currency formats to the number format dialog windows in 71 locales and 38 languages, funded by FSF.hu Foundation, Hungary: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/7.5#Default_.E2.80.9Cspell_out.E2.80.9D_number_and_currency_formats Best regards, László Németh P.S. Note: My free software company was named after the worst spelling mistake of the Hungarian spell checker of MSO 19 years ago. “Csevej” is the correct version of the word. The open source Hungarian spelling dictionary, which I made between 1998 and 2002 with help of several other free software volunteers, recognized the word and rejected its incorrect version from the beginning. Moreover, with Hunspell it gives correct suggestion for the incorrect version “csevely” and for all the other common j->ly and ly->j mistakes, which was a very useful improvement compared to MS Word. During the extension of Kevin B. Hendrick's MySpell, spell checker of OpenOffice.org, I made a generalized suggestion algorithm for the common n-letter distance mistakes of the different languages, this was the REP(lacement) rule, one of the first features of Hunspell. -- László Németh, 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 -- 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] LibreOffice in app stores free, paid or both?
Hi Paolo, Hi All, On 2022-07-11 15:52, Paolo Vecchi wrote: Hi all, I just wanted to ask the community how they think LibreOffice should be published in the various app stores. Should it be: a. available at a cost b. free More precisely, free of charge. LibreOffice could remain free with the first option, too. See also https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html (It starts with "Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible—just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding.") c. both As this is one of the items that will be discussed during tonight's board meeting, it would be great to have comments in writing and also having you in the meeting to share your point of view. Today topic of the board meeting is only the initial publication, according to the agenda sent last week: "2. Status Report, Discuss: Status: LibreOffice in the app stores (Florian Effenberger, Paolo Vecchi, Thorsten Behrens, 15 mins) Status report and various ongoing discussions: * current status & timeline * publishing 'LibreOffice' free of charge initially? * publish 'LibreOffice Supporter' stating that users should buy that to support TDF"? * withdraw the free version if donation flow impacted? * update cycle, and how to move people to new versions? * should previous buyers (from licensed offers) get vouchers on request?" It's worth speaking about the possible future options later (which could be more). Moreover, as you well know, the board is going to do that after a few months, based on the experience with the initial publication. Now the only urgent task was to decide about the initial publication, so your question was misleading a little bit. Best regards, László Ciao Paolo -- László Németh, 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 -- 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] Work On Update LOOL (was Re: LOOL is about to be archived)
Hi Andreas, On 2022-06-24 17:51, Andreas Mantke wrote: Hi Laszlo, all, I'm not sure, if you as a former Collabora staff member don't any potential CoI in the whole topic. I'd prefer if only community members without potential CoI share their opinion on this topic. I'm not only a former Collabora contractor (near 3 years until 2017), but a former LOOL developer, too, and still like the term "LibreOffice Online". But now as a fresh TDF director ȧnd almost fresh full-time LibreOffice developer, I would like to continue on my 20-year contribution, based on my experience (see the case of my corporate client with LOOL mentioned in my previous letter). I also have no idea why it's not possible to work on a common ground of LOOL (LibreOffice Online) and why it is/was instead necessary to fork the code away from the LibreOffice community and rename it. If I look over the fence into another OSS community there is no such behavior. Maybe because the license is GPL and there is a contributor assignment for the foundation in place (or there is more common spirit in the project and the professional contributors are more divers). I'm sorry about the change, too. I don't know the details, maybe LOOL was never a core LibreOffice development, but it seems, there was no choice for Collabora Productivity, only forking. Likely the reason is known for the former TDF board, and Michael Meeks wrote about it, too, see "Why is Collabora Online its own project?" in https://collaboraonline.github.io/post/faq/. Forking is possible for everyone, but only with renaming. So it was very unfair to write about that renaming is some evil thing, while that was likely a mandatory trade mark issue for Collabora Productivity, too. The good thing, that CODE/Collabora Online are still "LibreOffice Technology (TM)" (see https://www.collaboraoffice.com/community-lot/), so we have the common ground. We must continue to recommend CODE/Collabora Online, as the best way to use LOOL code base: CODE is the only actively developed fork of LOOL, and this is the only maintained fork which associated with active LibreOffice development, while other forks left alone not only LOOL, but LibreOffice, too. Best regards, László Regards, Andreas Am 24.06.22 um 17:27 schrieb laszlo.nem...@documentfoundation.org: Hi, On 2022-06-23 17:09, Paolo Vecchi wrote: Hi Andreas, thank you for letting us know that you are working on it. Ideally it would be great to have a few developers working on it, especially to fix known security issues, and sufficient activity to make it viable. It is true that LOOL has been in a kind of limbo. The repository has been frozen "temporarily" but it kind of became a permanent situation. In your opinion, would reopening the repository for 12 months provide enough time for a community to form around it? It would require warnings until all the security bugs have been fixed and that it might not be well maintained until we see constant and sufficient activity but it could be an option to make it up for the longer than expected temporary freeze of the repository. 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)). 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. 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). 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)? 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. More information: https://collaboraonline.github.io/post/faq/ (by the way, Collabora's description mentions other maintained versions, like OSSII and Zimbra Docs). 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/. 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 Produc
Re: [board-discuss] Work On Update LOOL (was Re: LOOL is about to be archived)
Hi, On 2022-06-23 17:09, Paolo Vecchi wrote: Hi Andreas, thank you for letting us know that you are working on it. Ideally it would be great to have a few developers working on it, especially to fix known security issues, and sufficient activity to make it viable. It is true that LOOL has been in a kind of limbo. The repository has been frozen "temporarily" but it kind of became a permanent situation. In your opinion, would reopening the repository for 12 months provide enough time for a community to form around it? It would require warnings until all the security bugs have been fixed and that it might not be well maintained until we see constant and sufficient activity but it could be an option to make it up for the longer than expected temporary freeze of the repository. 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)). 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. 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). 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)? 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. More information: https://collaboraonline.github.io/post/faq/ (by the way, Collabora's description mentions other maintained versions, like OSSII and Zimbra Docs). 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/. 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. In my opinion, as LOOL was, CODE is still the key for the survival of LibreOffice. 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! 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. Best regards, László 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
Re: [board-discuss] [DECISION] TDF to publish LibreOffice in app stores
Hello, On 2022-06-08 11:44, Florian Effenberger wrote: Hello Simon, Simon Phipps wrote on 04.06.22 at 10:59: Can you tell us who "attended" the "meeting" please as only 5 votes were recorded so 2 must have been absent. that's something for the board to decide, how they want to handle this - happy to update the vote template if the board is fine with that. All board members are on this list, so we can gather some feedback. I'm fine with that. Best regards, László Florian -- László Németh, 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 -- 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] Merged proposal for in-house developers at TDF
Hi, Sorry, I hope my late answer will be as friendly and productive as I intended it to be. On 2022-06-01 17:23, Andreas Mantke wrote: Hi all, Am 01.06.22 um 11:11 schrieb Jan Holesovsky: Hi Andreas, Andreas Mantke píše v Út 31. 05. 2022 v 19:49 +0200: I'd be curious to know what would be (from the point of TDF's mission / statutes) the difference between working on the source code by in- house developers and by tendering and paying a commercial company for doing this work? I only could see the difference that in one case TDF has full control and has not to pay for the benefit of a commercial company. And thus in the first case could get reach more targets / tickets done than in the latter case from my point of view. The difference is that once you hire a developer / developers, the development becomes a mandatory expense - TDF has to pay their wage every month. Also when TDF switches targets, it has to pay for the time the developers have to spend learning the new area. On the other hand, the tendering is (and always has been) only budgeted from the excess, as the last thing after all the other costs (staff, marketing, infrastructure, etc. etc.) are covered - which gives TDF much more freedom in the planning: it can decide not to tender at all, if all the other costs give no room for that (and avoid hard decisions where to cut - infrastructure? conference? or even jobs?). I'm not sure if you're really thinking such simply or if you try to throw smoke grenades further. It seemed you try to create the impression that a contract of an in-house-developer is always for livelong and thus a big mandatory expense for a very long time. But I think you as the general manager of a commercial company should know better (?). The management of in-house developer is more lean and direct. Instead if you tender the development tasks you have to publish and advertise the tender, evaluate the bids, evaluate the milestones and the result(s). This is whole process consumes a lot of work time from TDF staff, board members and/or volunteers, which will be lacking in other important areas of the TDF/LibreOffice project then. Because a commercial company has to calculate in unforeseeable problems and realize a profit, the price for a tender is much higher. In addition the number of commercial companies, able to work on such LibreOffice source code tenders, is - spoken guarded - very clearly laid out. If we would see such 'diversity' outside of the TDF world we would name it a monopoly/oligopoly market and wouldn't expect a real competion. Over all I think the above answer shows that the role of a general manager of a commercial company, which has some interest in TDF tendering development, has a huge CoI with the TDF role(s). Thus I'd expect that this CoI should be solved asap and the appropriate measures taken to prevent TDF from further damage. Jan 'Kendy' Holešovský is not a "general manager" of "a commercial company", but engineering manager of Collabora Productivity, and founder and board member of TDF (https://www.documentfoundation.org/governance/history/, https://www.documentfoundation.org/governance/board/), one of the most productive developers of LibreOffice (2673 core commits, and 1000+ in Online), volunteering in the board, ESC, in the certification committee and on LibO hackfests, and last but not least, one of my kindest ex-colleagues. He tried to explain the risk of in-house development compared to tendering, answering your question. Tendering *guarantees* the result for the money, in-house development doesn't, proofed by my experience, too. The risk is not only losing money, but losing opportunity to fix as many bugs as possible, and losing trust in TDF, reducing volunteering in development (also from volunteering employees and owners of free software developer companies). I know this risk. I'm a contractor of a 2000-employee company. I develop LibreOffice and mentor (recently) 4 LibreOffice programmers, but mentoring previously a *dozen* other ones, who mostly failed in LibreOffice development. See my presentations about in-house LibreOffice development and mentoring: http://libreoffice.hu/build-your-libreoffice-development-team/ http://numbertext.org/libreoffice/nemeth_libocon2019.pdf If you check (the end of the) presentations, it's all about risk-minimization. Hiring has got its difficulties. For example, TDF wants a LibreOffice developer, but one of the applicants, the only certified LibreOffice developer with 15+ years experience is not sympathetic or she asks for too much, so TDF decides to hire someone with professional C++ experience, but without LibreOffice development experience. Why not? You may think naively, that within a few months you can get an experienced LibreOffice developer or development mentor, because LibreOffice is a C++ project. Time doesn't matter, because after having a professional LibreOffice developer, TDF will be able t
[board-discuss] Representation statement
I, László Németh, elected member of the Board of Directors of The Document Foundation, hereby and until further notice, nominate the following deputies to represent me during board calls and meetings, in the order set forth below: 1. Gábor Kelemen 2. Gabriel Masei 3. Ayhan Yalçınsoy Best regards, László -- László Németh, 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 -- 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] [VOTE] ratify board communication best practices document
On 2022-04-12 18:44, Thorsten Behrens wrote: Dear fellow directors, having discussed this and incorporated your feedback, calling for a vote, to: * ratify attached best practices as current board communication guidelines (verbatim copy from https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/f/900757 as of 2022-04-12 1600 UTC) Vote runs the usual 72 hours, please answer with +1/-1/abstain to this email. +1 Thanks, László Thanks, -- Thorsten -- László Németh, 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 -- 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] [VOTE] approval of preliminary budget for 2022
On Wed, 2022-04-06 at 08:15 +0200, Florian Effenberger wrote: On behalf of the Board, I therefore call for the following VOTE: Approval of the preliminary budget for 2022 +1 approve -- László Németh, 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 -- 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
