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Hello Marc,

2012/6/5 Marc Paré <marc@marcpare.com>

Hi Charles,

Le 2012-06-05 09:12, Charles-H. Schulz a écrit :

 Thank you for bringing that up, it's an interesting discussion. Here's
what I think reading your message. You're asking in fact two questions.
One of which might already have been answered by a few of our corporate
members/sponsors.
* LTS obviously means long term support. Both "support" and "long term"
  deserve careful consideration. I will in this email first focus on
  the term "support". If we speak of support, we must think of a
  support provider. In this case, does this mean we should think -as
  TDF, as a project- of providing professional support to users
  (obviously for a fee)? I don't think it's your idea, but I thought I
  would highlight the implications of such a matter.
* Have we studied what some of the existing support/service providers
  on LibreOffice already offer? I am not so sure but I'm under the
  impression that you can order support (and in this case a "LTS" kind
  of support) from Suse and Canonical (there are others) on one
  specific version of LibreOffice. That is, these vendors have one
  reference version of LibreOffice, say the 3.4.5, and they provide
  support and services on it making it their de facto LTS version.


Yes, this is fine as they will guarantee that LibreOffice will work on
their systems and they will take care of any dependencies and
network-ability. But I don't think they would undertake any code revision
and code features into their LTS versions, not unless they have a large
team of coders, which in this case would make them "competitors" to our
work/product (read "fork"). This would take us back to the days of the many
different versions of OOo -- the same situation that drew all of these
different groups into one LibreOffice community.

Leaving support/service providers to develop an LTS version, in my
opinion, is not the right strategy to adopt.



Back to your suggestion: do you mean we should relabel the older branch
"LTS", knowing that each of our releases in one branch really works
like a "service pack"? If we had the ability to provide incremental
updates (we will one day) we would have the feelings we have two
versions, and sometimes "maintenance updates". So at some point, say
the 3.5.4, we label it LTS, because we're close to open a new branch,
the 3.6, and we can suggest service providers to base their support
offers on this one for the time being. Did I get you right?


No. I suggest that at some point, the TDF/LibreOffice should designate an
LTS version for large/small organizations/businesses. These would have
developers oversee the fixing of bugs for a fixed term (let's say a 3 year
period) after which time another LTS version would be designated. The LTS
maintenance would NOT introduce any new functions to the distro but only
service bug correction. IMO, if any business entity would like to add any
new functionality, then this is where a support/service provider would step
in and, hopefully, contribute any development of code back to the community.

I don't really think this is a new concept as even Mozilla-Firefox offers
its own "Extended Support Release (ESR)" version for corporate users[1].
When critical software packages are installed in large corporations, a lot
of energy in investment of time, training and documentation is expended in
order to get employees up to speed. LibreOffice certainly falls into this
category (critical software -- wordprocessing software). While Firefox ESR
is being released initially for a period of approximately 1 year, IMO, I
believe they will ultimately find that a longer term will be necessary for
these large organizations. As for a version of LibreOffice LTS (or ESR),
the impact of change for large organizations is even larger due to the
amount of training of staff of new features (even more so in the
educational field with the training of younger students).

If we are looking to supplant MSO in the office place, we need to realize
and accept the simple fact that the amount of software/network testing as
well as (and even more importantly) the training of staff for large
orgainizations is considerable. I sincerely doubt that a "one year"-term
LTS for LibreOffice would suffice; one year is just about enough time to
test out the suite before it is even installed; most organizations simply
do not have the manpower to move any quicker.

If we wish to compete in the large business market place we need to plan
and develop more strategically with our releases. Developing an LTS version
will fix this. Otherwise, the choice will remain MSO for office use, where
MSO has a longer term of support with incremental changes for bugfixes and
where LibreOffice will remain marginalized as an office suite.



Interesting ideas here... I wonder how we could plot this with respect to
our existing resources.  The key issue here is resources . LTS only makes
sense if you derive revenue from it.I think we could  relabel one branch as
LTS, the older one if it brings more clarity. It will work for one year. I
don' think working on a branch for 5 years makes sense for a FOSS project,
as -again- the examples pointed out stem from commercial offerings (even
Mozilla with all its resources only provide a one year support and
Canonical or Red Hat offer paid-for support for customers paying each year))

BTW, as some people were wondering what an unstable release might look
like: you are all aware of course, that we released an Alpha version of
LibreOffice 3.6, that you can download it and test it? :-)

Best,
Charles.





Best,

-- Charles-H. Schulz Co-founder & Director, The Document Foundation,
Zimmerstr. 69, 10117 Berlin, Germany Rechtsfähige Stiftung des
bürgerlichen Rechts Legal details:
http://www.documentfoundation.**org/imprint<http://www.documentfoundation.org/imprint>Mobile 
Number: +33 (0)6 98 65
54 24.


Cheers,

Marc

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/**Enterprise/Firefox/**
ExtendedSupport:Proposal#**Benefits<https://wiki.mozilla.org/Enterprise/Firefox/ExtendedSupport:Proposal#Benefits>



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