[libreoffice-website] Re: The road ahead and missed opportunities

Hello everyone,


I've read several comments about the SC shunning away from its responsibilities. 
I think it would be fair to remember that the SC is a group of people (who are not perfect) who had 
the guts to break away from Oracle. They had the guts to leave a project they had been contributing 
to for years (sometimes more than ten) and to face difficulties, uncertainty, doubt, the hatred 
feelings of people they had been working with (some Oracle employees). The SC members got a vision 
and are working hard to achieve it. 


To say that we shun away from our responsibilities is I think unfair. But we certainly made 
mistakes. One of them is that we felt a website team could organize itself and that the mailing 
lists in general could run smoothly. It was often the case that it worked (and it's working) but 
when it comes to the website, it's obviously not true. We should have understood that something was 
wrong when the Drupal fans continued to discuss, unabashed and unfazed by the results of the CMS 
platform contest that had *clearly* nominated Silverstripe and tagged Drupal as *an option in the 
future*. We should have shouted and taken clear actions when we saw this website was being sunken 
into unproductive messages about a solution we hadn't picked but that some people felt they were 
still entitled to pursue. 


I am going therefore to apologize to several people and for several things (see below). One thing 
I'm not going to apologize for, however, is to have a written and recorded decision that the SC 
chose one solution that some people haven't read about or listened to. Our message was clear ever 
since the beginning: Silverstripe, and perhaps, later, Drupal. We cannot be blamed for the mistakes 
of other people. 


What I want to apologize for is the wasted time, of the present website team, for the people who 
contributed to the LibreOffice.org website and who invested a lot of their time and energy in it. 
Their work is of course not lost, since we're proud to have a libreoffice.org website. But I'm 
sorry they had to cope with all this incessant discussions and a seeming silence from the side of 
the SC. I would also like to apologize to the general public because while we're dealing with these 
kinds of issues, we're not advancing as fast as we want on others. I would, last but not least, 
apologize to the SC members, because I felt my time was -during a certain period before 2011- 
better spent on completely different issues. I should have stated and "barked" the obvious. But 
then since it was the obvious, I felt it didn't need to be barked. 


To all; I would like us to come back into a productive mood. We're here to contribute to our 
present website, not to something else someone feels should be better. There's plenty of ideas out 
there, plenty of people who would rather have us do something completely different: but at the end 
of the day, we work on one project, LibreOffice and comments, "do this" & "you should do that" are 
not really welcome here. 


Expect a more hands-on approach of this mailing list. We're grateful for contributions, but we're 
not here to stand the desires of people who cannot understand that Free Software does not equal 
chaos and always following their decisions. The Steering Committee (and soon the Board of 
Directors) is here to take decisions as well as other entities (see our bylaws). We're not 
dictatorial, because we owe you transparency and that our bylaws clearly show no one can have 
absolute or even too much powers. But what we want to set is an atmosphere in mailing lists that 
are focused on contributions and not on fruitless discussions. 


In the end, all of our actions, individually, collectively, can only be measured on one criteria: 
contribution. This is the way we move forward, this is why we are "Libre". 


Thank you,


Charles-H. Schulz.

-- 
charles.h.schulz
Sent with Sparrow
On mardi 18 janvier 2011 at 21:03, klaus-jürgen weghorn ol wrote:

> Hi Andrea,
> Am 18.01.2011 20:20, schrieb Andrea Pescetti:
>
> > Italo Vignoli wrote:
> >
> > > I have seen mentions of these "23 roles" many times, but I have not seen
> > > a list where they are described in detail. It looks like they have been
> > > developed without even asking the SC members - or the group of the
> > > founders - if this was the right approach.
> >
> > Since nobody provides the link (the one Klaus-Jürgen sent was not
> > working for me... a problem at mail-archive.com, perhaps?)
> Sorry for this: I took the <Archived at:>-link from the email, but I 
> didn't check it. My fault.
>
>
> > , this is the
> > message that started the discussion about the "23 roles":
> > http://www.mail-archive.com/website@libreoffice.org/msg01680.html
> Mine was: 
> http://www.mail-archive.com/website@libreoffice.org/msg01683.html in the 
> same thread. There are all 23 "roles" described.
>
> -- 
> greetings
> k-j
>
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