LOOL is about to be archived

Nothing no add, just want to express full support to previous

Hi Laszlo,

thanks for your engagement. Just a few notes as I've been directly involved in proposing to get the community to be more involved with LOOL and to enjoy it's use while trying to agree with the major code contributor a mutually beneficial way to do it.

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)).

I respectfully disagree.

We can surely promote the fact that there are members of the ecosystem that provide support and other services that TDF does not provide for LibreOffice Community on the desktop but then that's it.

As we are not, yet, delivering to our community LOOL Community we don't have a supported edition to recommend. CODE and Collabora Online are just other products from a member of the ecosystem that at present have no TDF's hosted community version to refer to.

So at the end we cannot recommend an enterprise version of something we do not publish.

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.

It was a very unfortunate outcome and but it's a long time that we promote the fact that corporate clients should seek adequate support services.

LOOL has been frozen, by a split board vote, due to the unilateral decision of the major code contributor to fork and not contribute back.

You will find in the board-discuss archives several threads that try to explain how hard the board worked to provide more support to members of the ecosystem and to find a mutually beneficial agreement but once we made good our side the agreement the other side just walked out.

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).

It is good that your corporate client can enjoy the benefits of the combined efforts in terms of code and lots of contributions from TDF and the wider community.

Your corporate client made anyway the right choice as, unless they have a very capable team able to fix bugs and contribute back to a community project as LOOL was, then they should get support from other parties.

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)?

Thank you for pointing to that page that has been heavily edited since last time I looked at it.

It now seems to be an advertising page for products for which TDF doesn't have a community counterpart so I wonder if those changes shouldn't be reverted.

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.

LOOL has been "temporarily" frozen for a long time so or we take a decision to bring it back to life, following suggestions that arrived in the past few days, or there is no LOOL and as a consequence no alternatives to point to.

OSSII seems to show that it is possible to have both a commercial and a community version, a bit of a shame that we couldn't find an agreement with a major contributor of LOOL. If it will be possible to create clear rules for cooperation, which might also include synergies to improve CJK handling, then that could be a commercial offering available for enterprise users. Needs more investigation.

Andreas options also requires investigation as it seems to involve backporting of an Open Source project managed by a commercial provider. It would be great to see if that commercial provider is also willing to cooperate under clear rules so that we can refer back to their products for enterprise users.

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/.

Corporate contributors surely prefer to have their projects/products/services promoted, which TDF does for version that it hosts, but CODE/COOL do not relate to LOOL any more so it should be up to them to market their own products and services.

Until we revive LOOL and we (re)create a community around it we should not point to commercial versions of it.

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.

We should actually evaluate if those product should use the "LibreOffice Technology" branding.

When Collabora Productivity moved LOOL's code from TDF's repositories to GitHub the first thing that it has done was to remove the header "This file is part of the LibreOffice project" from all the files.

Subsequently even the variables names have been renamed from LOOL to COOL.

This, and other changes, show the intention of removing any indication that the product COOL actually originated from LOOL and every indication that the project was a result of a common effort which included TDF and the wider community.

In my opinion, as LOOL was, CODE is still the key for the survival of LibreOffice.

CODE is now a product fully managed by a commercial contributor that decided to sever all links from TDF in regards to that product so unless they finally agree to join forces again and backport the code to LOOL there is nothing much we can do about their product.

On-line drafting tools are surely useful for many uses and users but there are still billions of people that cannot/do not want to rely on Cloud services to edit their documents so LibreOffice desktop with lots more features and better usability will still be very much relevant for many years to come.

LOOL, and products based on it, is just one of the ways to offer on-line collaborative editing so we may also want to investigate other ways to make LibreOffice available on-line.

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!

Respect is a two way street, TDF kept its promises but the other party decided to fork regardless.

TDF invests in other Open Source software as it's the right thing to do and we could evaluate joint investments if we had a LOOL to give to our community but this time the rules of engagement should be very clear so that the third party does not walk away after having benefited from TDF's and our community's investments.

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.

When I accused people of creating false hopes and providing misleading information in regards to LOOL, that pushed me to propose to have a properly structured offering in collaboration with the major code contributor, I have done it with lots of supporting evidence.

You will find all the evidence in the board-discuss archives, in public board meeting minutes and, as now you are a board member and you should take decisions based on objective data, in board email exchanges that I'm very happy to share with you.

I do understand that you are a new member of the board and if you check your emails you will notice that one of my first recommendations was not to limit your choices on what you have been told but to verify things by looking for the relevant objective data or you risk being mislead by narratives that could be slightly biased.

Best regards,
László

Ciao

Paolo

Hi Laszlo, all,

(...)

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.

if you look at the LibreOffice source code you'll find out that there is
no renaming of e.g. the start scripts of LibreOffice and its modules.
Like in the times of OOo you could run the program with 'soffice',
'swriter' etc.

Also as far as I know no former modules / directories got new naming
after the born of LibreOffice. Thus it is not common in OSS development
to rename source code files or directories after a fork.

Regards,
Andreas

Hi Sophie and all,

Hi Andreas, all

Hi all,

FYI: I wrote a short blog post about my work. And for those who like
visuals, I added two ones.

https://amantke.de/2022/06/25/work-on-revival-of-libreoffice-online/

Thanks a lot for your work on this, I really appreciate and welcome the efforts :slight_smile: Maybe what we should do is to have an online meeting between you, Franklin, Daniel, Paolo and of course who in the community is interested to follow-up.

I'm very much in favour of it.

It is also important that you express your opinion during the board meetings.

Coincidentally LOOL was put in Monday's agenda just to confirm its "disposal" so come to tell us what you think about it.

The new online version is a really good news for me (thanks a lot Franklin and Andreas for that), and I guess for a large part of the non European community (as well as for students, SMEs and so on). There is a clear interest in the community to have this online version.

There is still no "new online version", there are a couple of proposals on the table but it's up to all of us to make it happen.

This is for me rejoining part of the Foundation roots.

We might need a meeting dedicated to re-discovering the Foundation roots as I have the impression that some have different understanding of why TDF was created and what its role should be.

But we also have to think about the ecosystem and the value they have built upon this version and for us. I'm also concerned about this. We should not ignore it.

I fully agree with you but as TDF has grown and got more complex it is essential to set clear rules of engagement between TDF and the ecosystem.

I'm really happy that TDF come back in this dynamic, however I think a serious discussion have to take place between the ecosystem and TDF, not to stop TDF in acting like it was in the past, but to find a fair place to live for everybody.
I'm sure this place exists if all parties are ready to make an effort to reach a common goal.

You may have noticed some decisions that have been recently published, and there are more to come, showing that lots of work is being put into it so that we can ensure that there is a fair and predictable environment for current and future members of the ecosystem.

It takes time for a bunch of stubborn guys to get to some agreements but we are getting there. It would be great if we could have more diverse future boards to bring in different approaches to problem solving :wink:

I ask, if I may, everybody taking part to the discussion to have a deep thought to the international community we, at TDF, are committed to represent.

True and it would be great to have more feedback from other parts of the world.

Hopefully once Decidim is up and running we'll have an easier way to collect feedback and ideas from the various community so that it will be easier to help each others.

Cheers
Sophie

Ciao

Paolo

Replying from the smartphone.

The LibreOffice Technology umbrella brand has been developed to group all products based on the LibreOffice transactional engine, independently from their origin and from details which are irrelevant for the end user such as file's headers.

Prohibiting its use would be against the spirit and the objectives of the marketing plan, and would kill it forever (the label Community has already killed half of it, by providing a wrong message to the project stakeholders).

Best regards, Italo

Hi Andreas, *,

Andreas Mantke wrote:

I don't see the necessary respect for the work of every individual
in the LibreOffice community and all talents. It looks like if the
developers think they are the only important part in the community.

TDF has been celebrating & acknowledging the work of all volunteers,
if not since day one, then at least when we started to have dedicated
marketing staff. I'm personally very grateful to each and everyone,
contributing their time, energy, commitment & personal resources to
our projects.

I therefore find your statement needlessly divisive, at a time when
instead we should work towards more unity. It is also not constructive
- e.g. if you would have written 'the email from developer XY made me
think they consider themselves the only important part in the
community', we could have asked that person to clarify.

As it stands, it blames a large group of community members of
something that is likely not true (e.g. I myself don't believe only
developers are important).

The quoted excerpt is thus not the way we want to communicate here, so
let's please try to do better next time.

Thanks,

-- Thorsten

Hi Andreas,

Andreas Mantke wrote:

it would be great, if we could work together on a process to merge
both branches together and get the community versions in sync. I
think this could be done most easy on Github.

In preparation of the board call tomorrow, was trying to find your
sources - is it this repo on github:

https://github.com/freeonlineoffice/online

?

Thanks, Thorsten

Hi Andreas,

I'm not sure, if you as a former Collabora staff member don't any
potential CoI in the whole topic.

  I'm pretty sure though =) László hasn't worked with Collabora since 2017 and AFAIK has no (even indirect) commercial relationship with us since then.

  If working together at the same company with someone creates a five+ year CoI - then we have an issue, because large numbers of core LibreOffice developers have enjoyed working with each other at different companies over the years from Sun and Novell/SUSE onwards.

  In fact - it's wonderful that the community has managed to retain as many passionate and competent developers and keep their institutional knowledge for this time. It is perhaps more amazing that the ecosystem companies have managed to keep paying jobs for them: go LibreOffice!

I'd prefer if only community members without potential CoI share their
opinion on this topic.

  Clearly opinions can differ without anyone needing to be paid.

  For my part I'd like to pay a quick tribute to László - there is really a lot to say - much more than I can fit in a paragraph.

  László has contributed a huge amount to LibreOffice, not just the 700+ code commits[1], but also authoring our hunspell spell checker infrastructure (László has helped spell-check much of the web too via Mozilla & Chrome ;-). He authored our Lightproof grammar checker, the Hungarian spell checking dictionary, and don't let me forget LibreLogo - what better mix of TDF's educational purpose and promoting LibreOffice =) as well as being a long-term TDF member, working for FSF.hu, NISZ and perhaps more.

  Did I mention what a positive and thoughtful contributor to discussions he has been too - and what a wide experience of different FLOSS projects he has ? =) Thanks for all you do László =)

  Accusations of CoI can be extremely divisive, it is not a small thing to baselesly suggest inappropriate behavior - to shut someone down.

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.

  This is covered as a FAQ:

  https://collaboraonline.github.io/post/faq/#own-project

  Projects are all different - as you point out. Some go through periods of turmoil and strain and then come out of them again - I'm really hoping that LibreOffice can re-focus and move on constructively.

  Regards,

    Michael.

[1] - https://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/credits/

Hi Andreas,

Andreas Mantke píše v So 25. 06. 2022 v 00:05 +0200:

FYI: I wrote a short blog post about my work. And for those who like
visuals, I added two ones.

https://amantke.de/2022/06/25/work-on-revival-of-libreoffice-online/

Thank you for sharing that!

Seeing the pictures, you have not only applied the security patches,
but actually you took the entire Collabora Online and rebranded it as
LibreOffice Online.

You could have saved a lot of work, it was enough to configure
Collabora Online with:

  ./configure --with-app-name="LibreOffice Online" \
              --with-vendor="The Document Foundation" \
              --with-info-url="https://www.libreoffice.org"

Now the question is - does TDF want to be in a business of rebranding
other well behaving open source projects?

And - when you find out that COOL / LOOL is just the editing bit, in
other words, it does nothing without a file sync & sharing solution,
will you rebrand eg. Nextcloud or ownCloud to "LibreOffice Cloud" next?

All the best,
Kendy

Now the question is - does TDF want to be in a business of rebranding
other well behaving open source projects?

Yes. Specifically since a company decided to name after herself a
project that was - up to that moment - under TDFs umbrella.

I want to put it in black and white: being the most committing
contributor does not allow anyone to pick the source and move it away,
while have previously agreed to develop under a non profitable
foundation umbrella.

And - when you find out that COOL / LOOL is just the editing bit, in
other words, it does nothing without a file sync & sharing solution,
will you rebrand eg. Nextcloud or ownCloud to "LibreOffice Cloud" next?

No need to answer, I guess, since TDF is "The Document Foundation" and
not "The Cloud Foundation".

All the best,

Marco

Hi Marco,

thanks for your clarifications.

Now the question is - does TDF want to be in a business of rebranding
other well behaving open source projects?

Yes. Specifically since a company decided to name after herself a
project that was - up to that moment - under TDFs umbrella.

I want to put it in black and white: being the most committing
contributor does not allow anyone to pick the source and move it away,
while have previously agreed to develop under a non profitable
foundation umbrella.

I suppose many read the same message and have been let to understand that it was the case.

Even Collabora's own website used to convey the same message at the time:

"Will it be hosted by The Document Foundation?
    Yes: It will be hosted by The Document Foundation, and contributed to the LibreOffice project in the normal way, as was done for the Smoose / Collabora LibreOffice Viewer for Android, in accordance with Collabora’s open-first development policy.
Who will maintain LOOL after launch?
    Collabora will maintain it alongside the LibreOffice community, and all are welcome to contribute to development."

https://www.collaboraoffice.com/community-en/libreoffice-online-questions-answered-what-who-how-and-when/

And for years also TDF invested on it and supported it with its own staff and infrastructure together with contributions from the wider community:

"Today’s launch of the first LibreOffice application for Android pushes our community into exciting new waters. As we speak, new infrastructure is being prepared by Document Foundation Staff for documentation, translation, and bug reporting of the new app, laying the foundations for a busy future. This is just the beginning."

https://www.collaboraoffice.com/community-en/libreoffice-on-android-one-less-barrier-to-public-sector-open-standards/

Looking at the communication and the promotion that LOOL had also from TDF, well before I joined the board, made me believe that LOOL should have been made available to the community and that's why I published my proposal 2 years ago:

https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/2020/msg00091.html

The subsequent threads and board minutes provide a very interesting reading for those that want to understand more about what happened after I presented my proposal.

Regarding the freeze in my opinion should have never happened but at the time we didn't have a clear CoI Policy so a single vote from a what now would be considered a conflicted member of the board made that happen:

https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/2020/msg00648.html

Emiliano had a very good take at the time which also explained why we haven't seen a lot of requests to contribute to LOOL up to now:

https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/2020/msg00632.html

So it seems like there is more work needed to give LOOL an actual chance to restart as a proper community project under the TDF umbrella.

And - when you find out that COOL / LOOL is just the editing bit, in
other words, it does nothing without a file sync & sharing solution,
will you rebrand eg. Nextcloud or ownCloud to "LibreOffice Cloud" next?

No need to answer, I guess, since TDF is "The Document Foundation" and
not "The Cloud Foundation".

True.

I don't think TDF should get into services provision, we promote our members of the ecosystem to do that, but I did propose at the time to have also TDF branded connectors for NextCloud, ownCloud, Univention, etc. so that users would have a choice (naturally notifying that supported/enterprise version were available from our members of the ecosystem) but unfortunately that choice has been removed from them.

All the best,

Marco

Ciao

Paolo

Hi,

I want to put it in black and white: being the most committing
contributor does not allow anyone to pick the source and move it away,
while have previously agreed to develop under a non profitable
foundation umbrella.

Apparently some things changed there?
I think I tried to explain earlier in this thread how delicate it is to have a balance.

...
I don't think TDF should get into services provision, we promote our members of the ecosystem to do that, but I did propose at the time to

Did you ever realize that your proposals are mostly very interesting for hosting companies and negative for ecosystem companies doing development, in this case Collabora?

Cheers,
Cor

Hi Paolo, all,

(...)

Regarding the freeze in my opinion should have never happened but at
the time we didn't have a clear CoI Policy so a single vote from a
what now would be considered a conflicted member of the board made
that happen:

https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/2020/msg00648.html

in my opinion the CoI policy is only a concretion of the statutes. They
are not a reinvention of the statutes or something that goes above the
statutes. And thus the members of the board had to abstain from a
decision on a topic where they have a CoI. And if a member with a CoI
participated in such decision and voted her/his vote is not valid. This
vote has to be excluded from the result at a minimum.

Thus the board has to amend the result at least. And if the vote of the
member with a CoI was decisive the proposal was rejected.

And a short addition to the whole topic on forking away LOOL to COOL:
The foundation has to take care of the sustainability of its assets.
Beside a capital stock there are two big assets: the brands LibreOffice
and The Document Foundation.
The fork of LOOL to COOL didn't strength the brand LibreOffice, instead
this diluted and weakened the brand. It had an negative impact on the
value of the brand.
Maybe it's the same effect, if you add dilutive additions to the product
name of the software (with the perception of second class software).

Regards,
Andreas

Hi Andreas, all,

Andreas Mantke wrote:

Thus the board has to amend the result at least. And if the vote of the
member with a CoI was decisive the proposal was rejected.

Our current CoI policy makes some helpful distinctions between an
interest in something, and the determination of an actual conflict of
interest. At the time, the vote was called & the decision published &
acted upon (so apparently there was no CoI determined).

I don't think it is constructive to revisit the details of a decision
the previous board took in 2020.

If you want to change the status quo, I suggest you pledge your case
to the current board, with arguments not attacking an old vote, but
why the actual change would be needed.

Cheers,

-- Thorsten

I do think such decision needs to be undone, as it was a clear mistake in first place. Would be nice to had all this discussion here back then.

Hi all,

Hi Andreas, all,

Andreas Mantke wrote:

Thus the board has to amend the result at least. And if the vote of the
member with a CoI was decisive the proposal was rejected.

Our current CoI policy makes some helpful distinctions between an
interest in something, and the determination of an actual conflict of
interest.

It does even if IMHO is not yet fully understood especially by new members of the board.

It would have been great that during the weekend, where unfortunately I was not present, the board took as first item the presentation of what is TDF as intended when it has been created, the explanation of the statutes and principles that should be the basis for understanding the role of BoD members and the CoI policy so that members could recognise when their actions and decisions are influenced by external factors and/or interests.

I've proposed that as I think it's essential for all members of the board to use that information as the basis on which to shape their debates and decisions.

Unfortunately it seems like no time has been made for it so we'll have to find time for a session where we should invite the founders and those that wrote the statutes to explain to us again what their vision was.

Then naturally we should have another session with our legal counsel which helped shaping the CoI Policy to explain in clear terms what it means and how it works.

  At the time, the vote was called & the decision published &
acted upon (so apparently there was no CoI determined).

Actually Andreas raised the issue of CoI but at the time we didn't have a clear definition of it:

https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/2020/msg00660.html

Apart from the debate about the chairperson decisive vote, this comment would be totally correct today:

"In addition: as far as I know two members of the board have a CoI on
this topic. But only one board member abstained from voting (correct
behavior). The second approved the proposal, instead of abstaining. This
could be seen as a violation of his duties as a member of the board or
his loyalty for TDF. Thus his vote had to been rejected (and not counted
in)."

At the time I was not yet sure what to think about it as the rule wasn't clearly defined in the statutes and internal comment seem to indicate that we could not strictly consider it CoI.

When Collabora Productivity's general manager decided to fork LOOL he added at the end of his statement:

"Clearly Collabora participants would want to abstain on any board vote
to ship competing Online products, but do expect to be included in the
discussion around that."

That might induce some to think that he was aware that a vote on LOOL related items by person affiliated with Collabora Productivity would have triggered a CoI but he didn't, as member of the board, point out that the vote from his marketing manager should have been removed.

It is probably too late to invalidate that vote but it is not too late to do the right thing today and give LOOL another chance.

IMHO it is today clear that Collabora Productivity's employees and partners should be excluded from such vote and also from imposing their own proposals on how to deal with LOOL's future.

Non conflicted members should review the proposal that has been summarily put together by our chairman, whose company is a Collabora's partner, during the public part of Monday's board meeting and implement the relevant changes that would allow the proposals received to stand a chance to develop into an active community.

I don't think it is constructive to revisit the details of a decision
the previous board took in 2020.

It is important to look at the past to try to correct eventual mistakes and avoid repeating them.

If you want to change the status quo, I suggest you pledge your case
to the current board, with arguments not attacking an old vote, but
why the actual change would be needed.

I believe that's what Andreas has been trying to do.

Sometimes it is also important to understand what led to a specific situation to evaluate the measures that should be implemented to correctly deal with issues and proposals.

Cheers,

-- Thorsten

Ciao

Paolo

El 1/7/22 a las 17:16, Cor Nouws escribió:

Hi,

Paolo Vecchi wrote on 01/07/2022 13:54:

On 29/06/2022 22:29, Marco Marinello wrote:

I want to put it in black and white: being the most committing
contributor does not allow anyone to pick the source and move it away,
while have previously agreed to develop under a non profitable
foundation umbrella.

Apparently some things changed there?
I think I tried to explain earlier in this thread how delicate it is to have a balance.


I don’t think TDF should get into services provision, we promote our members of the ecosystem to do that, but I did propose at the time to

Did you ever realize that your proposals are mostly very interesting for hosting companies and negative for ecosystem companies doing development, in this case Collabora?

Cheers,
Cor

Hi Paolo, all,

Hi all,

(...)

is important to look at the past to try to correct eventual mistakes
and avoid repeating them.

If you want to change the status quo, I suggest you pledge your case
to the current board, with arguments not attacking an old vote, but
why the actual change would be needed.

I believe that's what Andreas has been trying to do.

Sometimes it is also important to understand what led to a specific
situation to evaluate the measures that should be implemented to
correctly deal with issues and proposals.

its the responsibility of the current board to review past decisions, at
least if the board gets a hint, that there has been a not declared /
overlooked CoI of one participant.

There is no space for closing eyes and proceed further.

Regards,
Andreas

Hi Gustavo,

BTW, my previous proposal can be seen as the first draft proposal from OSSII. I’ve discussed with them then proposed it in the list.

Now we’re waiting to see if anyone is interested in that.

Franklin

Gustavo Buzzatti Pacheco 於 2022/7/9 11:23 寫道:

Hi Franklin!

I think your proposal is fantastic. My impression is that you, in Taiwan, are having a momentum like we had in Brazil around 2002-2011, but much stronger than ours.

Here, in the OpenOffice.org times, when we had a big adoption, the Brazilian government didn’t work enough to create and improve the local ecosystem neither contribute to the project, just focused on installation and use.

FMPOV, we should go ahead. Seems a possible way to reach some non-commercial & non European markets (better explained by Sophie in some last mails).

My question is: as details can be discussed with OSSII, who is the key person to start it? Could OSSII do the first step with a formal proposal to TDF, for example?

Best,
Gustavo

On Fri, Jun 24, 2022 at 1:48 AM Franklin Weng <franklin@goodhorse.idv.tw> wrote:

Hi,

Here I have a proposal: to have LOOL respository sync to another LOOL-derived suite:

https://github.com/OSSII/oxool-community

OxOOL is developed by OSSII in Taiwan, derived from LOOL. It has commercial version, which is several versions advanced to community version, while the community version is also open sourced. Currently National Development Council Taiwan, the main dominant unit of ODF policy in Taiwanese government, uses (forks) this community version into “NDCODFweb”:

https://github.com/NDCODF/ndcodfweb

which is also mainly supported by OSSII.

Besides NDCODFWeb and some other Taiwanese government units, OxOOL is also used in different companies and products. For example, it is integrated into ASUS cloud Omnistor Office (https://www.asuscloud.com/omnistor-office/), OpenFind SecuShare Pro (https://www.openfind.com.tw/taiwan/secusharepro.html). It is migrated into Pou Chen Group (https://www.pouchen.com) and some other big anonymous companies. Also, it is deployed in UNAU (https://www.unau.edu.ar/la-universidad/ ).

OxOOL v4 will be released in a month and can be a good and useful base to LOOL, also good to the LibreOffice community.

I’m not a representative of OSSII, but the GM of OSSII told me that they are happy to share the community version.

In this proposal there are two ways to relive LOOL:

  1. To sync current LOOL with patches from OxOOL community v4, which may technically take more time and efforts.

  2. Start a new repository from OxOOL community v4, which I’ll say that it is actually a “fast forward” from current status since OxOOL is also derived from LOOL, though a bit far before. It will be technically easier than 1., just that maybe some community people may feel uneasy or unhappy with this way.

Both ways are okay for me, as long as LOOL can be relived. However no matter which way, IMO TDF needs to employ in-house developers (independent from any ecosystem member) for rerunning LOOL. The second option, which is my prefer option, is a lot easier technically and in-house developers would just need to (cowork with community members and OSSII to) maintain LOOL repository.

Features in OxOOL commercial version are mostly (customized) requests from customers and hence may not necessarily need to be backported (to community version), but the GM of OSSII also promised that OxOOL Commercial version functions (which they think good / necessary to be back ported) and bugfixes will be back ported to LOOL (and OxOOL community version too).

Of course, after reliving LOOL all developers are welcomed to contribute to LOOL.

Details can be discussed with OSSII.

Regards,
Franklin

Paolo Vecchi 於 2022/6/21 20:15 寫道:

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

[0] https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/2022-June/088982.html
[1] https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/2022-June/089018.html
[2] https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/Policies/Attic

Hi Gustavo,

Gustavo Buzzatti Pacheco 於 2022/7/9 11:23 寫道:

Hi Franklin!

I think your proposal is fantastic. My impression is that you, in Taiwan, are having a momentum like we had in Brazil around 2002-2011, but much stronger than ours.

Here, in the OpenOffice.org times, when we had a big adoption, the Brazilian government didn't work enough to create and improve the local ecosystem neither contribute to the project, just focused on installation and use.

FMPOV, we should go ahead. Seems a possible way to reach some non-commercial & non European markets (better explained by Sophie in some last mails).

My question is: as details can be discussed with OSSII, who is the key person to start it? Could OSSII do the first step with a formal proposal to TDF, for example?

Best,
Gustavo

For OSSII, Kevin Lin, the GM of OSSII, also a TDF member and a LibreOffice Migration Consultant will be the key person.  Jeff Huang who is now his employee  is also a TDF member.  They both can represent OSSII for discussing reliving LOOL using OxOOL as a base and further cooperative mode.

For technical part, AFAIK the relived LOOL is still under TDF not any commercial ecosystem member; and OSSII will backport their improvements (both for commercial or bugfixes)  as they think them worth doing, but not directly maintaining LOOL repository. Details can be discussed with them.

The main obstacles  will be language barrier and also some unknown political issues.  I'm not sure how much I can help with these but I'll see what I can do.   At least as long as any of you are interested in this proposal / this way to relive LOOL I can help you contact with OSSII.

Besides, Daniel R. has several years running OxOOL in his school.  He can be a good one to participate in the discussion too.

Regards, Franklin