Hi all,
as I was a person directly involved in the process that should have given to the LibreOffice community a usable LibreOffice On-Line I think I should add my comments to this thread.
Very brief summary of the events:
Back in March 2020, other new board members and I, started making enquiries in regards to why we weren't making available an up to date LOOL to the community. We were clearly "advertising" LOOL on the website but it wasn't in a easily usable state and I strongly believed we had to do our part to help e.g. schools and non-profits coping with remote working when the pandemic started hitting hard. After all, TDF has been created for the public benefit, and in this new situation with the lockdown, what would have been more beneficial to the general public than to support pupils, students, volunteers in nonprofits by providing a platform and sharing our knowledge, based on Free and Open Source Software? This would have allowed our Foundation and us, as citizens, to perform our civic duty to help and it would also have had a positive marketing effect for the members of the ecosystem. Unfortunately that opportunity is now lost, mostly in favor of proprietary vendors which just consolidate their position. It's sad. It's a lost opportunity for TDF and for the ecosystem.
As our enquiries weren't really answered I proposed a vote to get noticed. That finally got things in motion to evaluate the situation with LOOL, which in turn uncovered the understandable need the members of the ecosystem had for more visibility. To satisfy both needs in a fair way, work on the marketing plan was started, with the aim to satisfy everyone's interests. It's something we should have started much earlier.
It was also an agreed precondition to release LOOL in a more usable way and up to date so that we could do our part in providing a free on-line platform e.g. for schools and other non-profits.
Things seemed to be satisfactory for both Collabora and TDF, so both the marketing plan and the discussion to publish LOOL carried on until suddenly Collabora decided to announce the fork, just two weeks before our annual conference.
We already put a lot of effort to create and execute on a marketing plan and spent months in negotiations for LOOL's release in a way that would satisfy the wider community, without damaging economically a valuable member of our ecosystem, but unfortunately one party didn't fulfil its side of the agreement.
Collabora wrote most of the code, there seem to be no sizeable developers community around LOOL elsewhere and TDF has no internal developers to continue the development. This leaves us with two options: Collabora works with us on executing the marketing plan that includes LOOL, or members of the volunteer and enterprise community clearly state they want to work on a LOOL. If neither of those two options is actionable then we have to conclude that TDF has no LOOL to promote anymore, and it's another lost opportunity.
Sadly, the temporary freeze announced in 2020 did not help to find a solution. Since the beginning of the fork Collabora didn't respond to requests to find a mutually benificial solution to the issue. Instead it put its efforts in removing tags related to the "LibreOffice Project" and even renamed variables from LOOL* to COOL*, clearly indicating that they are not interested in reviewing their decision, so eventual backports to the original project are even more complicated from both a technical and relational point of view.
If in the next few months a small number of developers will express their interest to work on LOOL to fix bugs and/or take it in a different direction then it would make sense to re-open the repository. Closing it in my opinion was a mistake in the first place. It prevented people from contributing, so we don't even know if someone wanted to contribute, or if by now people just gave up.
If in feedback is received by either Collabora or the community then we should officially declare LOOL as end of life and stop promoting it directly, stop allowing third parties to benefit from this specific brand as they did for a decade and review the marketing plan to remove references to LOOL or third party products derived from it.
It is a real shame that a project which was presented during the 2011 LibreOffice Conference by a member of the community and supported by TDF over the years ended this way but at least it's a lesson learned that should help in:
1) Creating clear agreements with the projects we support/promote so that, even if a team/company writes the majority of the code, we will have clear indications of the benefits we can together bring to the community and the relevant expectations from both sides.
2) Making it very clear to current and future members of the commercial ecosystem that "The objective of the foundation is the promotion and development of office software available for use by anyone free of charge" so that it doesn't come as a surprise when TDF propose to fulfil its duties for projects that have been hosted and supported by TDF for so many years. TDF naturally welcomes new members of the ecosystem but the rules of engagement need to be defined as from point 1.
It is totally fine if someone wants to start his/her own projects based on LibreOffice and host them under his/her rules. However, I don't think it is fine to benefit from TDF and the work of its community for years, and then change the rules and walk away.
3) Employing internal developers which could help in maintaining LibreOffice and related projects so that we don't always need to depend on the goodwill of the members of the ecosystem or tenders to fix bugs, to write features that may be commercially uninteresting or too complex to handle for individual contributors.
4) Investing a lot more in marketing, communities and mentoring to diversify and expand our users and contributors base.
To conclude, I'd love to have LOOL back but now it's up to the wider community to show how much it matters to them.
We are now working on the 2022 budget, so now is the best time to speak out if you'd like specific projects to be supported.
TDF can and want to support contributors in many ways. If there is an interest to work on an online version, or in any other areas related to LibreOffice, let us know.
I am convinced that TDF does not compete against the commercial ecosystem, as some said.
TDF has goals and potentials that may have not even been expressed to their fullest extent yet but that leaves plenty of opportunities for organisations that understand we are members of a Foundation that focuses on "promotion and development of (FOSS) office software" for the benefit of all without expecting that someone pays for it (although donations are very welcome). Commercial organisation working with LibreOffice providing services to business users can be successful if they adapt their business model around what we do but they should not ask us hold back in fulfilling our duties toward our community.
Ciao
Paolo