Status quo on the Foundation, October 2011
It has been a while since I have blogged about the Foundation status, but the Steering Committee have been very active on this topic in the meantime. Now that we are handing over to the new Board of Directors, it is good to document where we have reached.
First, we are delighted that the elections of the first BoD are now official. As promised, the Steering Committee has ceased its existence, and the TDF members voted on the new BoD in an open, transparent and meritocratic way. Gratifyingly, the Members have elected the core of the former Steering Committee onto the Board and I’m thus able to use “we” interchangeably in this report! The next election to take place will be the one of the Membership Committee, so expect an official announcement on that soon.
On to the status of incorporation. As previously planned, we approached three German federal states, and got very valuable feedback from them. One of our three candidates showed very strong support and is most likely to be the final location for The Document Foundation. We don’t want to pre-empt any result and therefore will not communicate the state’s name in public, but the secret will hopefully be revealed very soon.
We have included many improvements into the legally binding statutes, based on extensive input from many sources. We are right now in the process of translating the German legalese into English, so our new Board of Directors can make a final review. Based on the Board’s decision, we will hand over the documents to the authorities and hope for a positive reply. As soon as we receive that, the legal setup of the Foundation will be started and we will finally be incorporated.
We’d like to take the chance to respond to some questions on the process of legally establishing our entity. It has indeed taken much longer than we had initially expected, and we have to admit that our estimation on the necessary timeframe was wrong. However, the whole lengthy process has been educational and has led to a much more considered outcome. Together with the community, we have worked extensively on bylaws we wanted to have reflected in the legal entity of the Foundation.
In contrast to the the former model of having a single corporate sponsor – and different to what many other legal vehicles could provide – the Foundation we are creating guarantees endurance, safety and stability for the whole community, both for end-users and for private as well as corporate contributors. It also gives the community very strong rights. While previously – legally speaking – any community rules were arbitrary, the rights given to community members in this new model are not only binding, but legally enforceable by every single member.
Again: The rights we promised will be legally binding and enforceable by our members. There are not many – if any at all – communities giving such strong rights to their members. Creating such an intentionally durable and strong structure from the beginning is uncommon and we found that this has been something innovative and new for our advisors as well as the authorities, which has led to the slow progress we’ve encountered.
We invested lots of time to express fundamental and legally binding rights for our community and that task has admittedly proved enormous. But the time invested so far is justified by the goals we wanted to achieve from day one – an open, transparent and meritocratic organization, independent from any corporate sponsor and designed specifically for the purposes of The Document Foundation rather than borrowed from elsewhere. We are sure spending this time has been very much worth it.
Saarland!
Why I removed LibreOffice from my computer and will not be re-installing.
1) LibreOffice operates in isolation. They do not want user input or they would make forums readily available like OpenOffice. Just go to the LibreOffice website and try to find one single forum or email address you can send a comment or question to. There isn’t any. There is a “GET HELP” page which offers shallow advice and links to other links, but no actual user help. After searching the LibreOffice site, I have concluded there is no built-in help. There are no user forums. There are no email address to contact for help or comments. You can get yourself on a mailing list, but that is just for LibreOffice to contact you, not the other way around.
2) LibreOffice claims there is “built-in” help, somewhere. Just go and try to find it. It is either well hidden or there really isn’t any built-in help. LibreOffice also claims they removed “built-in” help and replaced it with online-web-based help to “make the help content much easier to maintain”, but as of this writing, 7 Nov 2011, most of the pages I looked at in the online help appears to have not been updated since January 2011 – May 2011, or nearly six months to a year ago. The online help is among the worst product help facilities available, more like searching Google for hit-or-miss answers, then like using a dedicated help facility. LibreOffice claims it is available for download, but won’t tell anyone where it might be or how to install and use it in their product. How does a user get help when they are mobile without internet access? Who cares about Users anyway?
I am switching back to OpenOffice. At the very least, there is user help, forums, and contact information.
Come on.. I find it hard to believe that this comment is really from someone who is earnestly evaluating LibreOffice. The lack of meaningful or coherent substance is a red flag for me that this isn’t a non-partisan offering sincere feedback. Specifically (and briefly, per troll feeding discouraged):
1. If you couldn’t find contact information, you either gave it all of 30 seconds to find, or you’re lying. You certainly had no problem finding somewhere to publicly post negative PR, huh? I found the link to the Users Support list almost immediately. That’s because the link is above the fold on the “Get Help” main nav item found at http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/ (a page which lists a number of different ways to get in touch for support, including live chat). So.. what are you talking about?
2. I found built-in help by looking at the Help Menu, located in the standard place on the main menu nav as every other Mac OS X application. What more needs to be said?
The most obvious reason I find this comment disingenuous is that everyone knows LibreOffice has taken on a monumental migration task, motivated by what they saw as a critical time in history that would impact the cause of freedom of information for many years to come. Is this supposed to happen without some infrastructure hiccups? This entire project is happening because of all deep, fundamental belief in the rights of users so, again, what are you talking about?
I’m on my way to finally volunteering after wanting to get in here for many months. I also see some places for improvement and I hope I can help get them done as soon as I can.
Sorry to troll-feed, everyone. -R