Category: LibreOffice

Lothar Becker, Chairman of The Document Foundation’s Board of Directors, writes:

Dear community,

thanks for the feedback on the marketing plan draft via different channels so far. We want to let you know and have you take part, as the board is discussing the options now available with that draft.

In the meantime, some more feedback will be integrated in the document already and will be published on next Monday. This is still not the last chance for a change for version 7.0.0, but we will reach that point soon.

The last change for all strings and tags would be possible the latest by Monday, July 20. With some preliminary phase for decision making of the board the public feedback phase on all this will end by the time of the next public board call, i.e. Friday, July 17, 1300 Berlin time.

What are the realistic options so far:

• Variant 1: Implementation of a marketing plan would be postponed to V7.1, as no UI changes can be made in minor releases. This would imply a longer discussion period.

OR

• Variant 2: Implementation of the marketing plan draft with V7.0.0 with flavour tags.

At the moment it looks like, this would be called “Community Edition” (in change to the RC1) and with the introduction of the umbrella brand “Enterprise Edition” with explanations and pointer to ecosystem partner offerings.

The feedback here we still need until the mentioned Friday, July 17, 1300 Berlin time is about all strings and tags (e.g. “Community Edition”), you can give that on the board-discuss mailing list, or on Bugzilla.

OR

• Variant 3: As variant 2 above and further tweak all strings and tags for V7.1, after gaining experience and more feedback with it from V7.0.

We encourage all the community to bring in your opinions further, also on the public board call (Friday, July 17, 1300 Berlin time), and all the other channels. Please be aware, that any sort of decision of the board must be made the latest at the dates stated above.

Thanks so much for your input so far! All the best, and keep healthy!

Lothar,
Chairman of the Board

Dear LibreOffice Community, supporters and friends,

Thanks to the hard work put in by many individual and ecosystem contributors, working together as a team in different fields, such as development, QA, design, marketing, localisation, release engineering, infrastructure, just to mention some, in a few weeks’ time we will be welcoming our LibreOffice 7.0 milestone.

At the same time, we are discussing our vision for the next five years, with a starting point being marketing and branding. See our marketing and board-discuss mailing lists.

Due to draft and development work in the area of branding and product naming, some speculation, in particular related to the “Personal Edition” tag shown in a LibreOffice 7.0 RC (Release Candidate), has started on several communication channels. So let us, as The Document Foundation’s Board of Directors, please provide further clarifications:

 1. None of the changes being evaluated will affect the license, the availability, the permitted uses and/or the functionality. LibreOffice will always be free software and nothing is changing for end users, developers and Community members.

 2. Due to the short time frame we are working with, the tagline appeared on the RC and we apologise if this caused some of you to think we unilaterally implemented the change. Rest assured that the consultation with the Community is still ongoing.

 3. This “Personal Edition” tag line is part of a wider 5 year marketing plan that we are preparing, and it has the purpose of differentiating the current, free and community-supported LibreOffice from a LibreOffice Enterprise set of products and services provided by the members of our ecosystem. The marketing plan is still under development and discussion so we are eager to receive and evaluate your feedback!

 4. Any feedback (in an appropriate way) to our marketing plan is welcome. There are several ways to send feedback to the Board of Directors: the most preferred way is to subscribe to the “board-discuss” mailing lists (e-mail here to subscribe), in which many of the discussions will take place in public and be archived. Besides the mailing list, we have a regular time slot (around 10-15 minutes maximum) in our Board meeting public section, for which we welcome all the community members to join and raise their questions. The Board meetings are held every two weeks and are announced in a timely fashion on the board-discuss mailing list.

 5. We are strongly opposed to any form of harassment, on any medium. Feedback itself is not an harassment, but personal attacks are. Please stay focused on the objective and be polite in your conversations!

 6. The team of editors for the marketing plan is weighting all the input, as it is important to get the feedback to define a clear strategy supported by the entire Community. We encourage everybody to support the Board, the marketing team and the Community working out the details; certainly we don’t want to make any decisions that is backed only by a small minority.

 7. This is a complex decision involving many overlapping concerns. We encourage people to read the detailed background slide-deck that Italo has produced, so that they can contribute to the current state of the discussion.

Apologies again if misunderstandings arose! We would very much appreciate your feedback and support!

Best Regards,

From all of The Document Foundation Board members