Re: Community - who and where are we? [was: Logo for 10th...]

Hi Alex, all

I step in here, but could reply to many other mails.
Sorry for not having the time to reply earlier as it has been my upload 
that started this discussion.

Alex Fisher schrieb:
 > Jonathon wrote:
>> [...]
>> Alex Fisher wrote:
 >>> It has been said that most of the OO.o community is backing this.
[... adding back the most relevant part of this paragraph IMHO ...]
>>> I have trouble believing the figures put forward. Bear in mind that the
>>> Community Council is *not* the entire community. The Developers are
>>> *not* the entire community. They are *part* of the community, and *only*
>>> part of it.

You are right: the entire community is very hard to define.
But the Community Council is much more than what Jonathon describes:
>>
>> The Community Council represents the users.

It represents all community members and therefore it represents the 
community as a whole.

Personally I don't think that it helps if people want to describe their 
position and show how much support they got in saying "We are the 
community".

But what should be clear to everybody, is:

All the Community Council members not being employed by Oracle have been 
involved in setting up the Document Foundation. Everybody of them 
represents a large area of the OpenOffice.org community.

None of the Oracle employed Community Council members joined the 
Foundation by now, and they represent very important and active 
OpenOffice.org projects as well.

>
> That is how it is supposed to be. But that also implies some sort of
> consultation, which is completely lacking here

That's right too, but I can't see any possibility to avoid this problem 
during the time the Foundation became more than an idea.

You are all aware of the foundation being part of the first agenda when 
the OpenOffice.org community became alive [1].

Just a few hours ago Björn Michaelsen repeated on the germanophone 
mailing list
"wenn man eine Foundation gruendet, mit eigener Finanzierung und 
Infrastruktur (Repos, Wiki, Mailinglisten etc.) ist das eine Sache, die
dem Projekt sicher nuetzt."[2]
[personal translation]: "... if you establish a foundation, with it's 
own financing and infrastructure (repos, wiki, mailing lists etc.) this 
is something that serves the community for sure ..."

I'm quite sure that nearly every community member might support the idea 
of an independent foundation being able to provide the legal support Sun 
Microsystems did in the past and Oracle was handed over with Sun's 
acquisition.

I don't want to count other positive aspects of not being dependent on a 
single company's good will. They have been discussed sufficiently.

But I want to come back to the point, why there was no consultation of 
the lists beforehand:

Everybody reading the mailing lists and press releases/articles in the 
past 1 1/2 years will have noticed, that there have been topics leading 
to very different opinions inside the community.

ODF icons, new logo, trademark policy ... - even if there has been some 
discussion on these topics that seemed to lead to better integration 
between Oracle employed and other community members, finally only the 
Oracle positions have been implemented, other's are pending for a long 
time or have just been ignored.

Together with the public reception of Oracle's attitude against other 
open source projects, people couldn't avoid thinking of the threat of 
Oracle dropping OpenOffice.org in favor of Oracle Open Office / Cloud 
Office in near future. Michael Bemmer's presentation at the OOoCon 
didn't help to reduce this fear.

So the necessity for a foundation became pressing, while the fear of 
Oracle repressions (including totally dropping OpenOffice.org support 
and leaving the community without any infrastructure) seems 
comprehensible to me.

The only way to solve this problem was to establish at least a minimum 
of infrastructure before the foundation became publicly known.

Therefore it was not possible to start discussions on the mailing lists, 
but long-standing community members with an established reputation from 
all the different community areas have been involved from the beginning.

>
>> The Developers are the people that work on the product.

For independent developers the new foundation brought the possibility to 
contribute to OpenOffice.org without the need to share their copyright 
with one single company (possibly their employers competitor) being able 
to relicense their work in any way they want to.

It's just the trademark issue, that prevents the initiators from staying 
with our good and well-known name.

It has always been mentioned that the LibreOffice name was meant as 
placeholder.

>>
>> Take a look at who registered the various LibreOffice domain names. And
>> look at how fast those domain names were registered.
>
> That (the hasty registration of domain names) only serves to increase my level
> of suspicion relating to the motivation.

Even if you think differently - registration has been done by many 
individual community members shortly after the announcement. Coming from 
different OpenOffice.org projects, they wanted to avoid others to 
harvest users for the case the OpenOffice.org trademark will not be 
given back to the community.
>>
>> [One reason why the formation of Document Foundation, and LibreOffice
>> had to kept under wraps, was to minimize domain name cybersquatting.]
>
> There could (and should) still have been much more consultation outside the CC
> and devs than there was. Such could have been achieved without prematurely
> revealing the putative names favoured by the breakaways.

Sorry, Alex - not everybody believed not to reveal the planning to the 
public could be involved at an early stage.

If Oracle management would have got premature notice, they would have 
had every possibility to destroy the community if this would have be 
their goal.

The risk was too high in the initiators eyes.
>>
>>> To the vast majority of people who comprise the community, this
>> announcement would have come as a complete shock.

You're right, even if there have been lots of indicators for the 
discomfort of central parts of the community with Oracle's behavior.

Most Native-Lang leads and MarCons have been informed some days before 
the announcement of the foundation, but more was decided to be too 
dangerous.

You can call the people behind the Document Foundation overcautious and 
paranoid, but if you look at the development during the last months, 
it's fully understandable in my eyes.
> [...]
> I still remain to be convinced that this is really what the majority of the
> community (which must include end-users and others who have any involvement
> with OO.o (the product), not just the developers and marketeers) truly wants
> to see happen.

I can't speak of every community member, but there are only a few 
community members not agreeing with the new Foundation and LibreOffice 
as the best way to involve other companies and developers in our mission:

"To create, as a community, the leading international office suite that 
will run on all major platforms and provide access to all functionality 
and data through open-component based APIs and an XML-based file format."

What I still have to mention is the Oracle employed community members, 
having spent up to 20 years in developing StarOffice and OpenOffice.org.

Despite some other comments, they are still an important and relevant 
part of the community and it would be great if there was a way to 
integrate the efforts of Oracle based development and the Foundation 
work in one single community and it's product.

But as long as there is no constructive discussion between Oracle 
management and the Document Foundation, divergence will grow, as both go 
on with the way they think to be the best - causing more work to do in 
case of an approach later on.
>
> My personal concern is that this move has sounded the death knell for OO.o.
> IMO, it is the end of any real chance we had of seriously reducing the market
> share of Microsoft Office.

There is a risk - no question. But this risk becomes smaller with every 
developer and supporter joining the Foundation. [3]

And the risk of being dropped by the "owner" of OpenOffice.org (my 
assumption that Oracle donates the infrastructure to the community was 
told to be false during the last days) has to be taken into account too.

Best regards

Bernhard
(describing only my personal thoughts and position)

[1]: 
http://www.openoffice.org/white_papers/OOo_project/openofficefoundation.html
[2]: http://de.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=dev&msgNo=45004
[3]: http://www.documentfoundation.org/contact/tdf_numbers.pdf