Hi Marco, Thank you for your questions!
There has been a lot of positive changes regarding the Online in the last year; like that the CODE docker images have no limits of users or documents any more; that the documentation is freely available to anyone at https://sdk.collaboraonline.com/ ; that a support channel for CODE has been set up: https://forum.collaboraonline.com/ and that we (Collabora) have started actively supporting the LibreOffice Technology brand in Collabora Online: https://people.collabora.com/~kendy/tdf/collabora-online-about.jpg https://people.collabora.com/~kendy/tdf/nextcloud-office-about.jpg and on our webpages: https://www.collaboraoffice.com/community-lot/ Regarding your concerns - please read inline: Marco Marinello píše v Po 20. 12. 2021 v 20:34 +0100: > 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. Given that we are doing FLOSS (Free / Libre / Open Source Software) here, I wonder how would you like to frame such a legal contract, given that the "right to fork" is one of the basic Free Software freedoms? And what if it was not a company, but another group (do you remember IceWeasel?) >From my point of view, rather than legal contracts, a much better strategy is to listen to what the ecosystem companies or other contributors are telling you; work with them, instead of against them; treat them as partners, not as enemies. If you do that, there is no reason for anybody to leave the community, move the code away, or fork. In the Online case, we (as Collabora) were trying extremely hard not to have to move the development outside of TDF infrastructure, and we have done many steps to fulfill asks of various people. Unfortunately - they were demanding more and more; and at some stage they wanted just too much: to dismiss the agreement we had with TDF that LibreOffice Online will be a source-only project, for *everyone* to build their branded versions on, ie. it won't be a binary product that people can download under LibreOffice name from TDF pages. This agreement was in place to ensure that the economics work correctly, and all ecosystem companies (not only Collabora) can build their Online's on top of the shared code. > 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. Sure - I was unprepared for the question, it was ad-hoc, so everything I've said there was without the possibility to have the numbers at hand in advance :-) Let me add the details now: d0edfeabbdc969a9a66cf90976a63c2f4403a6d3 was the last commit that happened on the TDF infrastructure. It covers work from 2015-03-03 to 2020-09-30. The amount of people who have contributed during those 5 years and 7 months was 85: $ git log d0edfeabbdc969a9a66cf90976a63c2f4403a6d3 | grep '^Author:' | sed 's/^Author: //' | sed 's/ <.*//' | sort | uniq | wc -l 85 In the rest of the period, so from 2020-10-01 to now, the amount of people who have contributed in the 1 year and 2 months was 75 (155 if I include the translations - but that wouldn't be correct): $ git log --invert-grep --grep=Weblate d0edfeabbdc969a9a66cf90976a63c2f4403a6d3.. | grep '^Author:' | sed 's/^Author: //' | sed 's/ <.*//' | sort | uniq | wc -l 75 Do you see the 5 years vs. 1 year proportion? > 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. Definitely it should be a concern - and I've stressed this several times on other occasions that the main reason why I am standing for the Board is that I want to make TDF more welcoming (to get new contributors) & friendly (to keep the existing ones). And by contributors, I mean not only developers, but also translators, designers, documentation authors, QA and other people actually enhancing the project. > If GitHub can magically attract developers, also TDF, from my point > of view, should move there. There are many pro's and con's; eg. we were criticized after the move that GitHub is proprietary software & infrastructure. Also I think gerrit works better for a C++ project rather than the system of PR's known from Github. But if you think even TDF should consider the option, please do feel encouraged to research that & come up with a proposal to the ESC and the Board! > 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. I am actually not sure what should I conclude from this? Are you arguing that Nextcloud is doing better on GitHub than TDF on its own infra, or that it is doing worse? Can you add how many open issues are at TDF? How many tags, bots etc. do we have? > In his speech, Kendy also mentions that “we [Collabora] love > LibreOffice”. I am sure that what he says is true, Yes, we do love LibreOffice, just have a look at the amount of commits coming from Collabora to the LibreOffice repository :-) > 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.” statement from the headers > of the source [3] and changed the variable names [4]. Unfortunately there is no way for me to win this argument. If we keep those names & comments, it could be argued that we are misusing the LibreOffice name - "why do you say that you are part of the LibreOffice project when you are not on TDF infrastructure?" But when we have removed it, it could be argued that we don't love LibreOffice enough... Luckily there are hard data that show where we stand - Collabora has contributed 32.3% of commits that went to LibreOffice since the last October; which is BTW on par with what we (or any other company) are allowed in the bodies as the percentage of representatives, so it seems to be a healthy number. > 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. I am still not sure I understand your reasons - why it is so important to you to name this code "LibreOffice Online"? The code is still Free Software under the same MPL license, as it was under TDF. The code is flourishing on GitHub, so the FLOSS world wins; and only few people actually care if it is named "LibreOffice Online", or "Collabora Online". Of course, we as Collabora are actually among those few who *do* care if it is called Collabora Online or not, because that helps us to get customers, and re-invest the income into the code; see more here: https://www.mail-archive.com/board-discuss@documentfoundation.org/msg04727.html The last thing - have you noticed the recently announced "Nextcloud Office"? https://nextcloud.com/blog/nextcloud-hub-2-brings-major-overhaul-introducing-nextcloud-office-p2p-backup-and-more/ The same Online code is now available under the "Nextcloud Office" name... Please ask yourself - what is the value of non-atticized LibreOffice Online? What is better for FLOSS in general: One common code on GitHub with multiple names (all promoting the LibreOffice Technology, but none of them actually called "LibreOffice Online"), or 2 diverging forks, one of them consuming TDF money, but called "LibreOffice Online"? Thank you! All the best, Kendy -- 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
