One thing I wanted to ask to you since you seem very experienced with LibreOffice is how much effort and money is spent on ODT and other formats. Why not simply use and improve docx like we do with pdf?
Second, Is Libreoffice's goal is to be MS Office's OSS clone? If not why? MS Office is quite good and the potential office apps users are mostly non-programmers.
I know PDF is by adobe and Docx is by microsoft.
Showing that an open file format could do everything was a big part of forcing Microsoft to switch from .doc to .docx, which is much more open
I am paid by TDF to onboard new contributors. I think it is going rather well, with many FOSS outsiders being lured in.
Conference expenses are a small part of the budget. A software project is much more than pure development.
or does leadership at TDF have that mozilla ceo style BS mindset (paying herself millions of dollars salary while laying off actual developers because of cash issues)
TDF was set up as a German charity in a way that it can not operate like a full-blown software company. It has a staff of 11 (some part time like me).
TDF is funding development constantly by contracting out work. Budget item proposals for this year: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Budget2021
TDF ledgers are public: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/Ledgers
Annual reports are also produced as required by German law: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2020/08/10/tdf-annu...
why?
isnt mozilla working just fine as a software company run on donations? why is libreoffice dependent on 70% development commits by collabora?
this model has clearly not worked in the interest of community so why is TDF even pretending to be someone they are not?
contract work is not same as full time employees.
why this pretence?
In a delicate situation like that, don't you think it would have been rather brazen to go for a Mozilla Corporation type of model?
In the corporate/business use case there are both open source and cheap licensed/self-hosted versions of web based editors.
I don't really use a word processor or other parts of an office suite very often.
I contributed my inputs to the discussion threat that raised the issue of "community" branding.
What I said was: keep the current libreoffice as is because that is what it is. Additionally, go and create another "business office" or whatever you care about but leave libreoffice as is.
The businesses behind this move, collabora et al see libreoffice as another "market" they need to acquire. Foss be damned.
During this time, I learned that all the "donations" to tdf are used for "conferences and shit" instead of what as donors we assume it would be used for, "paying developers" because of some stupid quirk, they cannot "compete with businesses" or other nonsense.
I have started using calligra office and it has been a similar experience. Nothing to write home about but still not depressing as libreoffice gets at times. I dont know, onlyoffice flipped against the "community edition" by restricting features and I feel LO going there slowly because of "early business advanced features" in the business edition that would come because of this change. That leaves us with calligra office suite which is still holding out but yeah, my money is now on that. Note: i have been a OpenOffice /libreoffice user since 2008 I think so I have been using it for over 12-13 years.