Hi Laszlo,
On 11/07/2022 17:38, laszlo.nem...@documentfoundation.org wrote:
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.")
Naturally we all know that and that's why "free" in this context I
didn't think it needed explaining.
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?"
The issue is that an agenda has been sent out after the vote about the
things we should have discussed started.
The questions you see there are a good part of the objections I made for
which no answer or debate has been made.
The wisest thing, IMHO, would have been to debate those, come to an
agreement on how to handle those issues and then run a vote for
something that had at least the resemblance of a plan.
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.
Well... I mentioned the strategic benefits of starting with the free
version and that we could have published it much earlier but we are
still stuck with paperwork for the paid version.
Now the only urgent task was to decide about the initial publication,
so your question was misleading a little bit.
Sorry but there was no "urgent task to decide about the initial
publication", we would have done that if there was an actual debate with
various options and strategies on the table.
Would have made a difference to ask for feedback from the community last
week, talk about it during the week and today and then go for a more
structured vote where we could all have taken a more informed decision?
Now we are still stuck as we should decide if we want to use only
"LibreOffice" or use "LibreOffice %something", decide on the eventual
duration of upgrades and decide on potential use of vouchers to start
with so I guess that it doesn't make sense to publish until we decided
what to offer and that pushes the decision to next week or the one after.
If objections were being listened to maybe today we could have announced
an actual strategy and that this week LibreOffice would have been
published with a clear message.
Best regards,
László
Ciao
Paolo
--
Paolo Vecchi - Member of the Board of Directors
The Document Foundation, Kurfürstendamm 188, 10707 Berlin, DE
Gemeinnützige rechtsfähige Stiftung des bürgerlichen Rechts
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