Hi Marco,
You called me on the topic thrice (as proposer, in the current Board and
most probably in the next) so I think your email requires my answer now.
Il 20/12/21 20:34, Marco Marinello ha scritto:
first of all, I'd like to state for those that are not into the current
status quo that this proposal will mainly affect the "Online" project at
TDF's infra.
Not only. I can also name the Android "LibreOffice Viewer", for example.
While I will keep replying to your kind inquiry to some extent, please
understand that the proposal in no way aims to solve the issues you
touched in the rest of your email, that are only tangent to the main
goal of the proposal, which is:
"clearly explain that some code, hosted at TDF and which was worked on
by the whole community, is indeed FLOSS code but it is not anymore
worked on and can be unreliable for production, unless serious
development/support work is put in it."
I have to say, as a contributor of LibreOffice Online and a member of
TDF, this proposal makes me completely unhappy
Well thanks for stating it out, but I have to say unfortunately we
cannot always have what we want.
In the LOOL specific case, it is pretty obvious that TDF itself, or its
wonderful volunteers, cannot provide the same level of support that
other ecosystem companies provided before the move, to a point where it
is impossible to state that that code was suitable for production anymore.
To better explain my statement, let me uncover the fact that, some
months after the move (and IIRC before the official freeze), Collabora
has kindly offered to backport (for free) some security fixes from
Collabora Online to the TDF-maintained internal LOOL instance, which
weren't reported nor fixed by others in TDF venues. Stated that, it
should be self-evident that, as of now, the community at large cannot
support the Online code available at TDF. And we cannot, in full
honesty, set expectations of a stable project anymore.
However:
1 - The code has always been open-sourced, so if anyone/any company had
some interest in the project might have forked it and made it workable
again (which didn't happen until now, to my knowledge);
2 - The attic proposal (with its de-atticization procedure) provide
clear rules for resuming a project that was halted, something that the
freeze didn't provide for, and sets some clear indication (albeit yet to
approve/confirm and probably unsatisfactory to some) on how to consider
if eventual development is deemed sufficient or not for its resume.
It's not the best approach/implementation, most probably, but it is a
start. I hope everyone can find the time to propose modifications and/or
underline their own issues with the proposal.
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 a pretty raw summary, but it is an oversimplification, to my
perspective, and as any oversimplification, it does harm to one side or
the other, or both. It also infers that the rules of the game were clear
from the beginning, which I don't think holds true in this specific
case, for a number of reasons; at least expectations has been falsely
set (I assume in goodwill) on and from "both sides" and were never
corrected during the years of development of the Online project.
A lot of hard to estimate, hard to balance, actions and decisions has
happened during the time, and some actions/decisions that should have
happened didn't really happen. I'm not pointing any fingers or guilt
anyone in specific for what happened or not happened.
Lack of publicity of some discussions/decisions might have obfuscate the
matter, leaving it as a dark, opaque discussion out of the reach and
oversight of the community, to the point that even members cannot tell
the full picture, yet as of now.
I'm positive that there is fair and logic reasoning supporting both
"sides of the argument" (because, remember, we are all part of the same
community and should have the same goals), but the net result was a
lose-lose situation for everyone (users, community members, TDF itself,
ecosystem companies, developers, etc.), to me. Also, in hindsight it is
always simple to point out errors, while that's not that simple to avoid
them happening in the first place.
We cannot avoid ecosystem companies to put substantial efforts (money,
tens or sometimes even hundreds of k€) on LO code (and in fact this is
normally a blessing for the project itself; to be more fair, ecosystem
companies are used to push changes directly into LO master/main branch
while developing changes in the first place). Whether these
