Hi Kendy, On 09/02/2022 15:57, Jan Holesovsky wrote:
Hi Paolo,Paolo Vecchi píše v St 09. 02. 2022 v 15:09 +0100:The community and our valuable members of the ecosystem have been asking us to invest more in developmentIt is important to understand that "community" means "contributors"; as opposed to "users". "Users" are not part of the "community", until they start contributing; via code, QA, translations, marketing under the TDF umbrella, etc.
I'm sorry but I have to strongly disagree with your statement."contributors" are not opposed to "users" as users, which are/could become contributors at any time, are amongst the main beneficiaries of all TDF does as from our statutes and mission as a Foundation.
We do encourage users to contribute in any way they can even with simple things like filing a bug or simply promoting LibreOffice to their friends and family helps our community. Even the simple fact that they use LibreOffice can be part of fulfilling our goals as it helps with the "distribution of FLOSS philosophical and cultural ideals".
On libreoffice.org we can also read:"LibreOffice is Free and Open Source Software. Development is open to new talent and new ideas, and our software is tested and used daily by a large and devoted user community."
Even Collabora's own forum includes users in their own community "competent community of users, integrators, and developers"
I think that, as part of the on-boarding process, we should include a session hosted by Florian and Mike Schinagl that clarifies to all why TDF has been created, what its role is and what we should all keep in mind while performing our duties as members of the board.
With that in mind - can you please point us to those requests?
There are plenty of examples in board's public and private meetings and even in articles that have been published quoting members of the ecosystem.
Eg:'TDF has around €1.5m in the bank, Meeks said, but something that may surprise outsiders is that the foundation cannot and does not use that money to employ developers.'
'Thorsten Behrens, IT lead for LibreOffice at CIB, told The Register he was "99 per cent in agreement" with Meeks, adding: "The TDF is a charity; it's not in the business of developing software and actually cannot, because that would put it in competition with the commercial ecosystem," as well as threatening its charitable status.'
or'Turning TDF donations into feature/function improvements is not only a process that at best is approximately 10% of that total development..."
These clear calls, from 2020, for TDF to invest more in developers have been listened to and some misconceptions, which have been holding back TDF for a long time, have been clarified.
Some comments are very odd as we know that "The objective of the foundation is the promotion *and development* of office software available for use by anyone free of charge." and it isn't clear at all how improving LibreOffice could be in competition with the commercial ecosystem, the commercial ecosystem partners focus on their own market segment with their own services which TDF doesn't provide.
So, as things are much clearer, we can now get to work to make TDF an active code contributor which will help in making LibreOffice better for all.
Thank you! All the best, Kendy
Ciao Paolo -- Paolo Vecchi - Deputy 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
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