Re: Stepping back from The Document Foundation

Hi Florian,

        So - first, this belongs on the discuss list - please follow up there
and not on the developers list where it is out of scope.

On Sun, 2013-01-13 at 16:54 +0100, Florian Monfort wrote:
> And that has consequences: we're too slow -acting..

        As a foundation - IMHO we're pretty good at decision making :-) at
least - compared to larger companies; still we're worse than small
consultancy outfits.

> And you can talk about "contributors", but the thing is, here it is
> totally different: those guys are paid by Red Hat, Canonical or SuSe.

        One third of our patches (and often the coolest ones that are not
commercially driven but really improve stuff), come from un-affiliated
volunteers.

> The truth is the community is mainly made of people who are paid full
> time for it: so YES, we should promote an actual "product", not a
> community that is practically non existent.

        I don't know where you get this 'truth' from :-)

> But it looks like speaking of a "commercial offer" would sound crazy.

        What do you want to sell ? if it is such a good idea - why can't you
start a VC funded firm (or whatever) to produce it, and be part of the
LibreOffice community along-side other companies that make a business
out of supporting and developing the project & their derived products ?
Is there any real need to bet TDF's success on some business venture,
for-pay-product etc. ? Ultimately we're a charitable non-profit
foundation. Don't let me discourage you doing that though - if you have
a good idea: start a business, and if it helps LibreOffice I'd be happy
to help you help us.

> Well I'm sorry to say I disagree with all this, and I'm thinking this
> is too bad: LibreOffice could actually grow faster and with a larger
> community, if at least people were capable of recognizing that
> "business" is the actual model to adopt

        Seriously; we have applied a -lot- of brain cycles collectively to the
problem of how to make the project self-sustaining (OpenOffice was not),
and create opportunity for businesses around it. If you're aware of some
magic bullet that we are not - please discuss it on discuss@. If you can
raise seed funding for your idea - I'd be most happy to help identify
people to hire, etc.

        Anyhow - again, please follow-up only on discuss. Thanks for your
contribution ! I'm sorry we didn't manage to met your high
expectations :-)

        All the best,

                Michael.

-- 
michael.meeks@suse.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot