Enable TDF to contribute more code to LibreOffice with in-house developers to address our donors specific needs

Thank you Sophie!

Having also feedback from the members of the Team is very important for me as you'll have to deal with your new colleagues as well :wink:

Please do reach out saying openly what you see right and/or wrong in this proposal so that you can help the board in making the right decision for TDF and our community.

Ciao

Paolo

Hi Paolo,

(...)

(..)

if we talk about TDF employees or contractors, we need more
mentors - because that is the only way how to scale:

"Give a person a fish, and you feed them for a day. Teach a person
   to fish, and you feed them for a lifetime".

This is what TDF should be doing in my view - teaching how to fish, not
fishing itself.

The best person that can teach you how to fish is an experienced
fisherman.

but it wouldn't improve the situation, if - like today - the experienced
fisherman / fishermen take every new talented fisher immediately from
the free software developer (volunteer) market.

Thus there is now chance for a divers market with a lot of small and
local businesses around the LibreOffice project. Thus the (business)
user of LibreOffice will not get the opportunity to choose between
different service provider.

If this situation will not change immediately the LibreOffice
certification program will not give a competitive edge.

Regards,
Andreas

Hi Andreas!

but it wouldn’t improve the situation, if - like today - the experienced
fisherman / fishermen take every new talented fisher immediately from
the free software developer (volunteer) market.

Thus there is now chance for a divers market with a lot of small and
local businesses around the LibreOffice project. Thus the (business)
user of LibreOffice will not get the opportunity to choose between
different service provider.

If this situation will not change immediately the LibreOffice
certification program will not give a competitive edge.

Do you believe TDF could spend donated funds on the salaries of developers who write LibreOffice, Andreas? As I recall when we were on the Board you asserted this would be an improper use of TDF’s funding under its bylaws?

For those unaware: TDF has previously extensively considered the proposal to employ LibreOffice developers, which is, as Daniel has commented, superficially very appealing. However, wanting something is not the same as it being possible to have something! The reasons we do not currently have internal developers include (among others):

  1. The question of whether TDF can spend money developing software. It has been asserted that it cannot.
  2. The question of who would decide what was written, and how, and how developers would be properly managed.
  3. Related to this, the moral imperative that TDF should not compete with its trustees.
    While I do not necessarily agree with the thinking behind these issues, any proposal before the Board would need a thoughtful and balanced proposal for resolving each of them. Perhaps one of the folk supporting the Board agenda item would like to write a paper that does that?

Cheers

Simon

Hi Simon,

Hi Andreas!

    but it wouldn't improve the situation, if - like today - the
    experienced
    fisherman / fishermen take every new talented fisher immediately from
    the free software developer (volunteer) market.

    Thus there is now chance for a divers market with a lot of small and

corrent sentence: 'Thus there is _no_ chance for a divers market with a
lot of small and'

    local businesses around the LibreOffice project. Thus the (business)
    user of LibreOffice will not get the opportunity to choose between
    different service provider.

    If this situation will not change immediately the LibreOffice
    certification program will not give a competitive edge.

Do you believe TDF could spend donated funds on the salaries of
developers who write LibreOffice, Andreas? As I recall when we were on
the Board you asserted this would be an improper use of TDF's funding
under its bylaws?

The only way to employ developers is for education and for science and
research (according to the statutes and the tax exemption). But the goal
has to be teaching others to work on the code and get some knowledge
(e.g. for the education part).

But if new volunteers get that knowledge, a certificate and were
talented developer they get very soon partner / staff of the biggest
market player. That would never lead to a divers service environment
around LibreOffice. Thus everybody who needs service around LibreOffice
will never get the opportunity (one strength of OSS) to choose between
service providers. There are other communities / OSS projects with
companies of different size and a divers project structure and no
company is dominating the project / community.

Regards,
Andreas

Hi Andras,

The best person that can teach you how to fish is an experienced
fisherman.

My example would be fruit grower and fruit picker (after all, the apple came before the fisherman :wink: ) but apart from that:

but it wouldn't improve the situation, if - like today - the experienced
fisherman / fishermen take every new talented fisher immediately from
the free software developer (volunteer) market.

Could be. After all it is one of the ideas behind for example GSoC.
On the other hand, in case it works out like that, it is good news on two fronts: apparently the commercial ecosystem party has enough income to hire someone extra; and also there still will be budget for us to hire mentors.
We also know that developers from commercial ecosystem parties are involved in getting mentors up to speed. So the whole picture does not have to look that bad, I think.

So spending that are intended to further grow the possibility of (relative new) developers to contribute (by mentoring, tooling, events), are a strong impulse to grow that side of the developer community and enabling more working people to help with code they think is useful.

Thus there is now chance for a divers market with a lot of small and
local businesses around the LibreOffice project. Thus the (business)

I remember we discussed possibilities in the past, that would enable relative independent new developers to get funded for work on LibreOffice. I think that is a good idea to grow the commercial ecosystem.

user of LibreOffice will not get the opportunity to choose between
different service provider.

Compared to various other open source projects, TDF/LibreOffice isn't doing that bad.
On the other hand, we can't blame projects for how they work as long as people are free to study, change, share, fork, ..

If this situation will not change immediately the LibreOffice
certification program will not give a competitive edge.

I love TDF for its work: being the place where all stakeholders meet and try to bring the best in the shared projects.
Then with my experience in a broad variety of commercial, volunteer and public entities, I'm far from convinced that it leads to anything good when a foundation tries to bend the forces that drive a commercial market.

Cheers,
Cor

Hi Simon,

Hi Andreas!

but it wouldn't improve the situation, if - like today - the
    experienced
    fisherman / fishermen take every new talented fisher immediately from
    the free software developer (volunteer) market.

Thus there is now chance for a divers market with a lot of small and

corrent sentence: 'Thus there is _no_ chance for a divers market with a
lot of small and'

And such chance exists right now?

local businesses around the LibreOffice project. Thus the (business)
    user of LibreOffice will not get the opportunity to choose between
    different service provider.

If this situation will not change immediately the LibreOffice
    certification program will not give a competitive edge.

Do you believe TDF could spend donated funds on the salaries of
developers who write LibreOffice, Andreas? As I recall when we were on
the Board you asserted this would be an improper use of TDF's funding
under its bylaws?

The only way to employ developers is for education and for science and
research (according to the statutes and the tax exemption). But the goal
has to be teaching others to work on the code and get some knowledge
(e.g. for the education part).

But if new volunteers get that knowledge, a certificate and were
talented developer they get very soon partner / staff of the biggest
market player. That would never lead to a divers service environment
around LibreOffice. Thus everybody who needs service around LibreOffice
will never get the opportunity (one strength of OSS) to choose between
service providers. There are other communities / OSS projects with
companies of different size and a divers project structure and no
company is dominating the project / community.

I think Andreas hits the nail on the head when he mentions that in other projects no company dominates the project or the community.

TDF has a development mentor, why shouldn't he be the one who decides what gets written, and how? I think it's not about competing with the valuable members of the ecosystem, it's about the foundation taking the reins of the project.

To give this discussion another spin: We pondered in the team about hiring a web developer. Someone between infra, code, mentoring and design. This person could also care about extension development (an area where users can participate in the development without knowing C++).

But in any case we are looking for a very special fisherwoman, and the experience from the past makes me think she's rather a mermaid than a real person.

Hi Daniel,

Daniel A. Rodriguez píše v Út 08. 02. 2022 v 19:31 -0300:

I think Andreas hits the nail on the head when he mentions that in
other
projects no company dominates the project or the community.

The contrary is true: Most of the successful open source projects have
a major, dominating company behind them - have a look at Nextcloud
(Nextcloud GmbH), ownCloud (ownCloud GmbH), MariaDB (MariaDB
Corporation Ag), ... and I can continue on and on.

In LibreOffice, there is no dominating company. Many like to paint
Collabora as one, but it is not the case due to how the founding
members (and I was one of them) have designed the TDF (with the 1/3
rule in the bodies and other means to protect from the project
domination) and due to how the German charity laws work.

Also, such thinking is very offensive to eg. Allotropia - who is doing
a great job undermining any kind of potential domination by excellent
engineering; have a look at their impressive WASM prototype.

But if you want to see an open source project with no company behind
them, have a look at Apache OpenOffice.

All the best,
Kendy

Hi Cor,

do you mind explaining to us what you mean with the sentence below?

I'm far from convinced that it leads to anything good when a foundation tries to bend the forces that drive a commercial market.

Cheers,
Cor

Ciao

Paolo

Hi Simon,

thank you for sharing your opinions with us.

On 08/02/2022 19:44, Simon Phipps wrote:

Hi Andreas!

On Tue, Feb 8, 2022 at 5:59 PM Andreas Mantke <maand@gmx.de> wrote:

but it wouldn’t improve the situation, if - like today - the experienced
fisherman / fishermen take every new talented fisher immediately from
the free software developer (volunteer) market.

Thus there is now chance for a divers market with a lot of small and
local businesses around the LibreOffice project. Thus the (business)
user of LibreOffice will not get the opportunity to choose between
different service provider.

If this situation will not change immediately the LibreOffice
certification program will not give a competitive edge.

I agree with Andreas that this is a great opportunity for TDF to extend its in-house skills which in turn could also provide more opportunities to enable new ecosystem contributors.

I’m sure there are many developers eager to join TDF to start working directly with the wider community with a great team that is with us not for the sake of having a job but because they passionately believe in what they are doing.

Do you believe TDF could spend donated funds on the salaries of developers who write LibreOffice, Andreas? As I recall when we were on the Board you asserted this would be an improper use of TDF’s funding under its bylaws?

It depends on the rationale.

If we perform specific tasks in-house, we create knowledge and skills within TDF that can be freely shared with the wider community. That’s a win-win for everyone. Accessibility is a field where we’re already active which requires further in-house investments but many other areas need further research and development to allow us to share documentation and knowledge which otherwise could be not made available by third parties.
There are many areas that are not economically relevant or interesting for volunteers and commercial contributors in which we must step in by investing in members of the team that will help in fulfilling our mission.

For those unaware: TDF has previously extensively considered the proposal to employ LibreOffice developers, which is, as Daniel has commented, superficially very appealing. However, wanting something is not the same as it being possible to have something!

For those unaware: some members of the current board had to fight hard since day one of their term to show others that a proposed project for a third party entity was suboptimal due to lack of proper analysis and investigation on what are the factors that could limit TDF.
The good thing that came out of that proposal is that finally we went through a proper legal analysis which has shown that some limitations that held back TDF were actually not there.

The reasons we do not currently have internal developers include (among others):

  • The question of whether TDF can spend money developing software. It has been asserted that it cannot.

It has been asserted through overdue legal consultations that we can invest money in many more ways that has been previously thought to fulfil our mission.

We now have a mentor that will train new developers, with varying degrees of experience, in how to develop for LibreOffice which will not only help in furthering the educational and research scope of LibreOffice with code but will also grow into mentors themselves allowing TDF to deliver more on its educational purpose and furthers its civic engagement which is another charitable purpose of TDF.

Not having had dedicated in-house developers did reduce our capability to fully deliver on our objectives, which are clearly stated in our statutes, so now that we have the necessary legal clarifications we should improve this situation immediately.

  • The question of who would decide what was written, and how, and how developers would be properly managed.

This is an organisational issue which will follow what is written in the proposal and I’m sure our ED, mentor and the rest of the Team will do a fabulous job in integrating the new developers.

In regards to what and how they will do it see my proposal. Depending on the skills that the developers already have they may initially focus on A11y or long standing bugs but then we will encourage them to grow in different areas so they can fully express the skills they are most comfortable with and that will benefit the community even more.

  • Related to this, the moral imperative that TDF should not compete with its trustees.

I see a few issues with this statement:

  1. How can we be in competition with trustees as they are individual members of our community who committed to help TDF and the rest of the community in many ways, not only code, to further our objectives?

  2. Even if you used the word trustees by mistake while you meant commercial contributors they surely read our statutes and our objectives so they positioned themselves to serve their own commercial clients without being concerned by TDF’s objectives.

  3. There is not only a moral but also regulatory and statutory imperative for TDF to pursue its objectives for the good of LibreOffice and its community so trustees and commercial contributors should actually be supportive and enable TDF in moving better and faster instead of trying to stop TDF in doing what it has been created to do.

While I do not necessarily agree with the thinking behind these issues, any proposal before the Board would need a thoughtful and balanced proposal for resolving each of them.

Now you should have a clearer view regarding the rationale behind the proposal and how the objections put forward are not valid any more.

All these issues could have been solved years ago but it seems we needed a suboptimal proposal presented at FOSDEM 2020 to start a process of verification and validation of what TDF can and can’t do.

TDF can and absolutely should invest in in-house developers to fulfil its objective for the benefit of the whole community while still complying with the parameters imposed by its charitable foundation status that have been purposefully chosen.

The community and our valuable members of the ecosystem have been asking us to invest more in development and now that we have finally gone through legal verifications we could start looking for new members of our team even today.

We can surely start within TDF and then evaluate over time if a fully owned and fully controlled subsidiary may allow us to deal with our growth in a more efficient way.

As it has been mentioned by a fellow director I looked at how the great people at Typo3 organised things. Typo3 is a non for profit that funds its fully owned company to deal with developers employment and commercial activities. It has been proposed to invite them to a board meeting to share their experience and we should actually do that so that we can evaluate a future option.

Perhaps one of the folk supporting the Board agenda item would like to write a paper that does that?

Putting the burden of writing papers on a member of the board is clearly not the most efficient way to deal with things and, as it happened already a few times, it gives the impression of being just a delay tactic for which I see no valid reasons.

I do appreciate that you learned from your past mistakes and that you now want to see more transparency and evidence that we actually did our research and analysis of the issues and the opportunities. There are documents available to the board which prove we did our job correctly but as they are part of interactions with legal experts the board will have to agree to make them public.

Cheers

Simon

Ciao

Paolo

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 development

It 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.

With that in mind - can you please point us to those requests?

Thank you!

All the best,
Kendy

Hi Kendy,

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 development

It 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.

With that in mind - can you please point us to those requests?

Sorry to be so insistent about RTL/CJK, but to illustrate what it means, see this bug:
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=104597#c40
it is months on the ESC minutes and it's very impacting for Arabic versions. This is one on the top of my head, but there are more of them on fonts, etc.
If you look at the names commenting this issue, you'll see several contributors here.

Cheers
Sophie

Hi Sophi!

Hi Kendy,

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 development

It 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.

With that in mind - can you please point us to those requests?

Sorry to be so insistent about RTL/CJK, but to illustrate what it means,
see this bug:
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=104597#c40
it is months on the ESC minutes and it’s very impacting for Arabic
versions. This is one on the top of my head, but there are more of them
on fonts, etc.
If you look at the names commenting this issue, you’ll see several
contributors here.

Do you have any insight into why the community has not chosen to fix the issue please?

Thanks

Simon

Hi Simon,

Hi Sophi!

Hi Kendy,

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 development

It 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.

With that in mind - can you please point us to those requests?

Sorry to be so insistent about RTL/CJK, but to illustrate what it means,
see this bug:
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=104597#c40
it is months on the ESC minutes and it's very impacting for Arabic
versions. This is one on the top of my head, but there are more of them
on fonts, etc.
If you look at the names commenting this issue, you'll see several
contributors here.

Do you have any insight into why the community has not chosen to fix the
issue please?

Reading through the bug (which was only an example) and other contributions, I don't think we can say that the community has not chosen to fix their issues.

Cheers
Sophie

sophi wrote:

> Do you have any insight into why the community has not chosen to fix the
> issue please?

Reading through the bug (which was only an example) and other contributions,
I don't think we can say that the community has not chosen to fix their
issues.

Wasn't that meant to be tendered?

Cheers,

-- Thorsten

Yep.

Hi Kendy,

Hi Daniel,

Daniel A. Rodriguez píše v Út 08. 02. 2022 v 19:31 -0300:

I think Andreas hits the nail on the head when he mentions that in
other
projects no company dominates the project or the community.

The contrary is true: Most of the successful open source projects have
a major, dominating company behind them - have a look at Nextcloud
(Nextcloud GmbH), ownCloud (ownCloud GmbH), MariaDB (MariaDB
Corporation Ag), ... and I can continue on and on.

I believe that the examples you mentioned actually confirm what Daniel said.

NextCloud has been forked from ownCloud apparently for divergences on levels of "openness" which may have something to do with some commercial choices on which Frank had no control but he can surely explain it better than me:

https://karlitschek.de/2016/04/big-changes-i-am-leaving-owncloud-inc-today/

Was Frank feeling that the commercial drive was clashing with his Open Source ethos?
He asked himself quite a few interesting questions:
"Without sharing too much, there are some moral questions popping up for me. Who owns the community? Who owns ownCloud itself? And what matters more, short term money or long term responsibility and growth? Is ownCloud just another company or do we also have to answer to the hundreds of volunteers who contribute and make it what it is today?"

Shouldn't we all ask ourselves the same questions?

MariaDB has been created as Oracle acquired Sun/MySQL and the contributors didn't seem to like the idea.
MariaDB Foundation has actively chosen not to get involved much in writing code while we actually have the contrary in our statutes.

Another organisation has been created as the community didn't want to be dominated by commercial interests of a single company.

In its announcement a founder stated:

"We believe that the Foundation is a key step for the evolution of the free office suite, as it liberates the development of the code and the evolution of the project from the constraints represented by the commercial interests of a single company. Free software advocates around the world have the extraordinary opportunity of joining the group of founding members today, to write a completely new chapter in the history of FLOSS"

In LibreOffice, there is no dominating company. Many like to paint
Collabora as one, but it is not the case due to how the founding
members (and I was one of them) have designed the TDF (with the 1/3
rule in the bodies and other means to protect from the project
domination) and due to how the German charity laws work.

I believe it's important to clarify that we are talking about TDF, the Foundation that is the home of LibreOffice and its community, not "just" about LibreOffice.

In terms of code contributions Collabora has a large impact as it's first in front of the "Unknown" category, RedHat, TDF and Allotropia.
As Italo said during FOSDEM code commits isn't all there is in terms of contributions so we'll probably have to look more closely at the data to celebrate the value of the many others that contribute to the project.

In terms of influence in TDF, Collabora has quite a large impact looking at the members in some of TDF's bodies so it would be great to have better representation.

The 1/3 rule is good but I guess that when it has been written when people were looking at a scenario were board members could have represented a very diverse and large number of commercial organisations. They probably didn't think there could be a company with employees, suppliers and their business partners in the same board.

There is work to do to understand why TDF hasn't been able to retain some of its contributors over the years and what we should do to attract more, not necessarily only developers, to have more people that can bring in new ways to look at the problems that all Open Source projects have to deal with and find solutions that work for our community.

Also, such thinking is very offensive to eg. Allotropia - who is doing
a great job undermining any kind of potential domination by excellent
engineering;

Allotropia has great developers with great potential for contributions.

  have a look at their impressive WASM prototype.

Allotropia is doing great with the WASM prototype and I reiterate my proposal to agree on a shared outcome in case investments from TDF are to be considered with some interest.

But if you want to see an open source project with no company behind
them, have a look at Apache OpenOffice.

If I'm not mistaken the vast majority of contributors to Apache OpenOffice decided to move away as they didn't want to be dominated by companies' commercial interests :wink:

Anyway the point here isn't to not have a commercial ecosystem, quite the contrary as we need more diversity to avoid creating a kind of "group thinking" that limits the board points of view about the issues we face and the solutions available.

Probably we should go back to the origins to see what the founders wanted TDF to be:

"The Document Foundation is an independent self-governing democratic Foundation created by leading
members of the OpenOffice.org Community. It continues to build on the Foundation of ten years'
dedicated work by the OpenOffice.org community, and was created in the belief that an independent
Foundation is the best fit to the Community's core values of openness, transparency, and valuing
people for their contribution. It is open to any individual who agrees with our core values and
contributes to our activities, and welcomes corporate participation, e.g. by sponsoring individuals
to work as equals alongside other contributors in the community."

https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/announce/msg00000.html

All the best,
Kendy

Ciao

Paolo

Hi,

Hi Daniel,

Daniel A. Rodriguez píše v Út 08. 02. 2022 v 19:31 -0300:

I think Andreas hits the nail on the head when he mentions that in
other
projects no company dominates the project or the community.

The contrary is true: Most of the successful open source projects have
a major, dominating company behind them - have a look at Nextcloud
(Nextcloud GmbH), ownCloud (ownCloud GmbH), MariaDB (MariaDB
Corporation Ag), ... and I can continue on and on.

once I read this sentences the first time, I thought I was in a
different film in 2010. But maybe I didn't understand the situation in
OOo project at that time.

Maybe this is due to the fact that I hadn't been at the dinner of an
inner circle during the Budapest conference.

In LibreOffice, there is no dominating company. Many like to paint
Collabora as one, but it is not the case due to how the founding
members (and I was one of them) have designed the TDF (with the 1/3

Sorry, but the founder of TDF was the association 'Freies Office
Deutschland e.V. (FrODeV)' with money from the world wide supporting
community.

rule in the bodies and other means to protect from the project
domination) and due to how the German charity laws work.

After some years in the LibreOffice project and TDF I reconsider that
the one third rule should have been one seat at maximum for an
organization. This would have lead to a more divers formation of TDF's
bodies.

But that is something that could be fixed only with high effort in case
there is a will to go in that direction.

Also, such thinking is very offensive to eg. Allotropia - who is doing
a great job undermining any kind of potential domination by excellent
engineering; have a look at their impressive WASM prototype.

But if you want to see an open source project with no company behind
them, have a look at Apache OpenOffice.

Sorry, but there are other OSS projects with a lot of business
contributors with different sizes and a balanced impact on the project.
In my view such a structure / ecosystem is much more healthy.

Regards,
Andreas

Hi Paolo,

Paolo Vecchi píše v St 09. 02. 2022 v 19:56 +0100:

He asked himself quite a few interesting questions:
"Without sharing too much, there are some moral questions popping up
for
me. Who owns the community? Who owns ownCloud itself? And what
matters
more, short term money or long term responsibility and growth? Is
ownCloud just another company or do we also have to answer to the
hundreds of volunteers who contribute and make it what it is today?"

Shouldn't we all ask ourselves the same questions?

Awesome - so now you finally understand how hard a decision it was for
us (Free Software lovers & contributors for decades) to move the LOOL
development to GitHub - because it was the result of asking & pondering
the same questions. Thank you for that!

Particularly:

* TDF does not own the community, TDF is an organization designed to
  make the community (let me repeat, "community" = "group of
  contributors") strong & flourishing.

* TDF does not own LibreOffice itself; it owns the brand, but the code,
  translations, etc. is owned by the particular contributors (ie. by
  the community) - to the level of lines of code, strings of
  translations, icons painted, test cases provided, etc.

* Long term responsibility & growth matter more - and when the LOOL's
  (sub-)community didn't grow under TDF, it was time to move on. The
  decisions shouldn't be about donation money.

And regarding the last one: "Is TDF just another foundation or do we
also have to answer to the hundreds of volunteers who contribute and
make it what it is today?" is for us, the new board, to improve -
because from what I can see, TDF was not listening to the contributors
the last 2 years too much.

Let's improve it together!

All the best,
Kendy

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 development

It 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