Re: [tdf-discuss] Who is Funding LibO?
On 10/26/2010 02:44 PM, Marc Paré wrote: Le 2010-10-26 12:31, Italo Vignoli a écrit : Gianluca Turconi wrote: A Foundation that collects funds and gathers contributions to further developing LibO, and steers the wider Community for that development, it's a reassuring idea. It's just like Mozilla. The Document Foundation was born with this same idea, although we do not see the same founding opportunities of Mozilla (as they receive 60 million dollars per year from Google for choosing Google as the default search engine). There will be announcements in the next two weeks which will improve the understanding of the organizational model and of the development directions TDF will be following in the future. Although each member of TDF Steering Committee is able to express his own opinions on the subject, I would not take every word as a statement on behalf of TDF. At the moment, the vast amount of positive enthusiasm around TDF is fostering ideas and innovations, and I prefer to see the discussion flowing instead of feeding the list with statements. In seven years, I have never seen so many people on the US marketing team, and this is what makes me feel very comfortable inside TDF: the amount of enthusiasm and positive feelings around the project. Shortly in the future, we will have a season of more disciplined discussions. Ciao, Italo As a new member, and not knowing the history of the group, as well as not a member the SC or any core group, I am also quite encouraged and impresseed of how the LibO and TDF are organising. I am also quite impressed of the TDF broaching such issues as what constitutes a member, corporate sponsorship with membership concerns etc. in consultation of the community. This is indeed a very promising project and team. I am sure the issue of funding will be addressed at some point but organising the community is of utmost importance. Once we are a little more organised and the first distro is released, we will be able to turn our more of our attention to corporate funding. As for the US and in my case the Canadian membership, I really think that the approach should be more of finding members by approaching individuals and organisations rather than sitting back and waiting for membership to grow on its own. We need to seed with enough members to attain an amount of critical mass so that the membership feeds itself. It will not grow unless we go out into the user world and try to convince them to join our LibO community. That said, I personally still expect a great product and a very professionally run organisation from the TDF/LibO. Judging from the chatter on the mailists and participation on getting the various aspects of the hardware/dev software etc. I can already see that these qualities are already part of the membership culture. Cheers Marc I haven't quite read all the messages regarding this subject as there are quite a few of them, so if I talk about something that has already been discussed, please forgive me. In terms of obtaining funding, I already see that donations are being taken on behalf of TDF, which to me is a good start. Is TDF going to have one central location with chapters throughout the world (like the FSF)? What about adding more avenues for donations, such as Google Checkout? Not everyone participates in bank transfers, and not everyone is comfortable using PayPal. -- Unsubscribe instructions: Email to discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org Posting guidelines: http://netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html Archive: http://www.documentfoundation.org/lists/discuss/ *** All posts to this list are publicly archived ***
Re: [tdf-discuss] Who is Funding LibO?
ian.ly...@theingots.org wrote in message news:50053.212.71.174.123.1288050361.squir...@www.theingots.org... Would someone please explain where the money is coming from to fund LibO? Where is it expected to come from in the future, assuming Oracle will not join? There are a few possibilities. One is the certification project that we are currently working on. (Actually I have been working on it now for several years and we have all the infrastructure needed in place) We can apply for EU grants to get it going as did ECDL. They are making enough money to fund 10 times more developers than Sun or Oracle ever did. Then there is merchandising and other fund raising plus the usual volunteers. This also assumes that none of the other corporates help and currently some are employing contributing developers. If we can get out of the mindset of dependency on Oracle I think we have the possibility of raising more money than was ever available before and spending it more democratically and independently. The speed and extent will depend on community support. Errm. I was looking for something a little more definitive than There are a few possibilities. LibreOffice represents a major change of direction in the free office suite market. If, as looks increasingly likely, Oracle will not back it then the entire community must decide which path to follow. When I say entire community I explicitly include the users. Everyone, but possibly especially the user community, needs to be reassured as far as is possible that if they commit to LibreOffice they will be moving to a viable product and not just a flash in the pan which will die from lack of funds in six months or a year. For individual, private users the impact can be readily borne even though it would be a pain in the neck to switch again in a few months time. But for institutions, on which the success of the project depends, it would be a fairly major catastrophe. -- Harold Fuchs London, England -- E-mail to discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org for instructions on how to unsubscribe List archives are available at http://www.documentfoundation.org/lists/discuss/ All messages you send to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [tdf-discuss] Who is Funding LibO?
Harold Fuchs wrote: Everyone, but possibly especially the user community, needs to be reassured as far as is possible that if they commit to LibreOffice they will be moving to a viable product and not just a flash in the pan which will die from lack of funds in six months or a year. For individual, private users the impact can be readily borne even though it would be a pain in the neck to switch again in a few months time. But for institutions, on which the success of the project depends, it would be a fairly major catastrophe. Hi Harold, this is true, but be aware that TDF is still in its inception/bootstrap phase. Expect more concrete answers when things solidify. But maybe there's a misunderstanding here - you should not necessarily expect that the foundation will fund all of LibreOffice - quite the contrary, our stated goal is to build an ecosystem of companies, that fund people, and share some common vision on where to move the project. And if you have *that*, any analysis will show that this is more viable than a project that relies on a single sponsor. As we speak, the number of companies that fund developers working on LibreOffice code is already larger than one. ;) Cheers, -- Thorsten -- E-mail to discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org for instructions on how to unsubscribe List archives are available at http://www.documentfoundation.org/lists/discuss/ All messages you send to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [tdf-discuss] Who is Funding LibO?
Marc Paré wrote: And the LibO project, as a community project, is not itself dependent on any funding support from anyone in particular. The community project should be able to stand on its own with membership involvement. Examples like the small contributions see on the website thread where some members have offered server space to mount website test-beds for some website webmasters etc. The community should be able to fund its servers and all hardware needed for its existence from its membership donations. Otherwise, it could not be called a community project. Please, don't get me wrong, but can I say that I'm just puzzled and a bit scared too from yours and Thorsten's statements? I'm starting to understand that many people in the original TDF founders group have a very specific vision about the Foundation that is based on a classic open source /diffused/ system rather than a /centralized/ The Foundation will show you the right path one. The former method worked in the past, that's sure. However, in such a vision of the project, a Foundation is rather useless. Revenue streams should be Community based. Decisions should be taken from important Community contributors. There is really no need for a Foundation. What if who provides the revenue streams or has made hugely important contributions makes decisions that goes against the Foundation interests and purposes? I'm really trying to understand this Community approach, but I'm just puzzled and scared, as I wrote above. -- Gianluca Turconi -- E-mail to discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org for instructions on how to unsubscribe List archives are available at http://www.documentfoundation.org/lists/discuss/ All messages you send to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [tdf-discuss] Who is Funding LibO?
Marc Paré wrote: The LibO project is community driven, and its members are what makes it live. Well, Marc, I got this point very well in yours and others' messages. :) But I still see a lot of confusion in this list about the meaning of Community and Foundation. I'd like to add more details about this consideration of mine, in order to explain because I'm feeling uncomfortable by reading many messages in this list. On 28th September, the day of TDF announce, I was contacted from some people who were interested in OOo ***vitality*** because they were supporting or advocating migrations to our office suite in my area. They were scared from the possibility that Oracle dropped OOo support and the product was simply *dead* because of lack of support from whatever *credible* organization. There were few news, so I contacted other people in the Italian OOo Community (among them, Italo Vignoli and Andrea Pescetti) for more info. Summing up what they wrote back, I've decided to reply to those people: as long as Oracle supports OpenOffice.org as an open source project and any other initiative is not clear, please support the main OpenOffice.org product and the scheduled migration to that product. Somebody agreed, somebody else stopped the whole migration. ;'( Among those who stopped, there are people who perfectly understand how free software works, but they need to know who is doing what in a project. In a nutshell: being sure of a sustainable development or, at least, being sure of a entity that takes care of making that development become sustainable in the future. I suppose this was the main concern of Harold Fuchs too. A Foundation that collects funds and gathers contributions to further developing LibO, and steers the wider Community for that development, it's a reassuring idea. It's just like Mozilla. A Community project, whose members can or cannot provide those funds or contributions, since they haven't a duty to do so, it's, well, just scaring for whoever is thinking to do a migration to something based on OOo code or to suggest people for that migration. BTW, I really like the idea of a Foundation, and I always liked it. Instead, I like a lot less the idea of a Community project, with or without a TDF association in it. I hope you understand what my point is, here. -- Gianluca Turconi -- E-mail to discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org for instructions on how to unsubscribe List archives are available at http://www.documentfoundation.org/lists/discuss/ All messages you send to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [tdf-discuss] Who is Funding LibO?
Le 2010-10-26 12:31, Italo Vignoli a écrit : Gianluca Turconi wrote: A Foundation that collects funds and gathers contributions to further developing LibO, and steers the wider Community for that development, it's a reassuring idea. It's just like Mozilla. The Document Foundation was born with this same idea, although we do not see the same founding opportunities of Mozilla (as they receive 60 million dollars per year from Google for choosing Google as the default search engine). There will be announcements in the next two weeks which will improve the understanding of the organizational model and of the development directions TDF will be following in the future. Although each member of TDF Steering Committee is able to express his own opinions on the subject, I would not take every word as a statement on behalf of TDF. At the moment, the vast amount of positive enthusiasm around TDF is fostering ideas and innovations, and I prefer to see the discussion flowing instead of feeding the list with statements. In seven years, I have never seen so many people on the US marketing team, and this is what makes me feel very comfortable inside TDF: the amount of enthusiasm and positive feelings around the project. Shortly in the future, we will have a season of more disciplined discussions. Ciao, Italo As a new member, and not knowing the history of the group, as well as not a member the SC or any core group, I am also quite encouraged and impresseed of how the LibO and TDF are organising. I am also quite impressed of the TDF broaching such issues as what constitutes a member, corporate sponsorship with membership concerns etc. in consultation of the community. This is indeed a very promising project and team. I am sure the issue of funding will be addressed at some point but organising the community is of utmost importance. Once we are a little more organised and the first distro is released, we will be able to turn our more of our attention to corporate funding. As for the US and in my case the Canadian membership, I really think that the approach should be more of finding members by approaching individuals and organisations rather than sitting back and waiting for membership to grow on its own. We need to seed with enough members to attain an amount of critical mass so that the membership feeds itself. It will not grow unless we go out into the user world and try to convince them to join our LibO community. That said, I personally still expect a great product and a very professionally run organisation from the TDF/LibO. Judging from the chatter on the mailists and participation on getting the various aspects of the hardware/dev software etc. I can already see that these qualities are already part of the membership culture. Cheers Marc -- Unsubscribe information: Email to discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org Posting guidelines: http://netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html Archive: http://www.documentfoundation.org/lists/discuss/ *** All posts to the lists are publicly archived ***
Re: [tdf-discuss] Who is Funding LibO?
Would someone please explain where the money is coming from to fund LibO? Where is it expected to come from in the future, assuming Oracle will not join? There are a few possibilities. One is the certification project that we are currently working on. (Actually I have been working on it now for several years and we have all the infrastructure needed in place) We can apply for EU grants to get it going as did ECDL. They are making enough money to fund 10 times more developers than Sun or Oracle ever did. Then there is merchandising and other fund raising plus the usual volunteers. This also assumes that none of the other corporates help and currently some are employing contributing developers. If we can get out of the mindset of dependency on Oracle I think we have the possibility of raising more money than was ever available before and spending it more democratically and independently. The speed and extent will depend on community support. -- Harold Fuchs London, England -- E-mail to discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org for instructions on how to unsubscribe List archives are available at http://www.documentfoundation.org/lists/discuss/ All messages you send to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted -- E-mail to discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org for instructions on how to unsubscribe List archives are available at http://www.documentfoundation.org/lists/discuss/ All messages you send to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
