Stepping back from The Document Foundation

[Florian Monfort]

Hi all,

I've decided recently that I would stop watching Document Foundation
activities. Indeed I've found myself completely overloaded with work from
School and Red Hat, so I cannot properly contribute.

I must also admit that this decisions comes with a reflection I make myself
more and more: I feel like we're not using the kind of structure we should:
we're a foundation and not a company.

And that has consequences: we're too slow -acting...

Especially when it comes to tasks, administration and everything targeting
management layer of the structure: I think we got too excited behind the
"contributor" word. Because what is a contributor in our field in
LibreOffice? Someone who works and "helps" when that person can: meaning no
free time, unless you're Superman or you start working on nights. And I
don't think this is the way we should promote contributing.

Also I think it is bad from us to do what we do now : we actually sit on
our developer's success. And you can talk about "contributors", but the
thing is, here it is totally different: those guys are paid by Red Hat,
Canonical or SuSe. In a way they are sain, and instead of talking they act.
Because we give them the time for it. And here we are calling ourselves
"contributors". The truth is the community is mainly made of people who are
paid full time for it: so YES, we should promote an actual "product", not a
community that is practically non existent.

Also getting to meet people who contribute but who have no job looks kinda
crazy to me. And here we are again: as a foundation we do things so slowly
that in two years we're only capable of hiring one person... That's a REAL
shame. We should all be ashamed of this: work should be rewarded: at least
with the capability of earning your own money to live. But it looks like
speaking of a "commercial offer" would sound crazy.

Well I'm sorry to say I disagree with all this, and I'm thinking this is
too bad: LibreOffice could actually grow faster and with a larger
community, if at least people were capable of recognizing that "business"
is the actual model to adopt, instead of some idealistic model that seems
to "work" and not "rock".

Anyway, it's a pleasure to be able to talk to any of you guys and meet you,
I hope you'll be courageous enough to keep on going with this journey.

Cheers

-- 
*Monfort Florian*
BM2 Student at France Business School
Marketing Apprentice at Red Hat
Marketing Team Member at The Document Foundation
florian.monfort at gmail.com
Mobile : +33 6 58 97 15 61
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/attachments/20130113/85fa4b06/attachment-0001.html>