
LibreOffice / The Document Foundation needs €50,000. Please donate. - Garbage
http://challenge.documentfoundation.org/
======
00joe
Foundations have quite a good tradition in Germany, and the benefits in terms
of taxes, limited liability and international credibility are high. With the
German-based model, activities are not limited to one country: the foundation
can and will be active worldwide.

In addition, the German model provides a high security and stability, as the
foundation's statutes cannot be changed and, therefore, cannot be abused.
Setting up a corporation or an association, on the other hand, would expose us
to the risk that, if a majority of all stakeholders so decided, the statutes
could be changed, even as far as removing charitable purposes. In order to
provide safety and stability, not only for our users, adopters, developers and
enterprises, but for the whole community, a German-based foundation is ideal.

In addition, we have many active community members in Germany: the roots of
the product originally lie here, we expect a lot of support from corporations
and governmental bodies, and the adoption rate for free office productivity
software is very high.

<http://challenge.documentfoundation.org/why/>

~~~
paral_10
a few key points (some added):

# a foundation is fully legal person # the foundation has no members #
therefore nobody can decide to change the foundations mission afterwards (f.e.
no shifting of mission values or other priorities possible) # the 50.000 € is
a recommendation, yes. part of the reason: only dividends and interest must be
used to finance the foundations activities. the 50.000 must stay untouched
forever. 50.000 € * 0,03 (average interest rate) = 1.500 € per year available
for expenses # again: the foundation is a cemented full legal entity which can
hold copyright owner rights

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mkr-hn
It seems too early for them to be asking for this kind of money. They've only
shipped one marginal improvement over OpenOffice. It doesn't make sense to me
for them to toss down so much money formalizing such a new organization.

This also has some unpleasant implications. Imagine if a large portion of
credible forks popped up on HN asking for money before they had a few versions
shipped. It would be a mess.

~~~
benatkin
> Imagine if a large portion of credible forks popped up on HN asking for
> money before they had a few versions shipped.

It would be great if we could have an argument about which of several credible
OpenOffice fork organizations we could support. However, this search pretty
much just turns up LibreOffice:

<http://www.google.com/search?q=openoffice+fork>

If they're gaming the system by finding a significant gap in the market, so be
it.

(By the way, I just downloaded and installed LibreOffice and it works great,
and there's no Oracle baggage. That counts for something!)

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forgottenpaswrd
That is the reason Free software products have so much problems becoming
competitive wit proprietary solutions.

People will pay without doubt $600 for a commercial product like Office but
have a lot of problems to contribute with someone making software for him for
free.

We don't value what is cheap, like a woman that plays "hard to get", we value
most what is expensive. When people pirate Photoshop they fell the value of
their software is at least $1000 because it cost that much, while the effort
deployed in GIMP, Inkscape or Blender seems worthless.

Those software products feel "almost there" but needs a lot of work for being
useful for a professional. These projects need real money for having people
working on them full time, not as hobbies like fontforge with his horrible UI
because the author does not care, just a hobby.

Note to LibreOffice guys: When people read EUR 50,000 they think "Those greedy
bastards want so much money from my pocket". Geeks or normal people seems to
ignore a lot about business, that it takes MILLIONS of dollars to make a
successful software product like Firefox, Android, Blender, Wikipedia,
Photoshop, FinalCut or AutoCAD. It took BILLIONS to made Office, Windows or
Linux.

So ask for small contributions and put a bar progress like wikipedia(people
love them) and write down the reasons people or companies paying you $20 is
good business for them. That you are more than 25 people working for them
because if you don't tell people don't know it.

If you were a company that asked $100 per seat, you will need just 500 seats
to get this money, MILLIONS of companies in the world need an Office suite so
don't be shy, ask for millions of dollars-euros like firefox did(And you will
get it because there is a need for it).

~~~
patio11
_People will pay without doubt $600 for a commercial product like Office but
have a lot of problems to contribute with someone making software for him for
free._

Additionally, corporations (which is where most of the money is in software)
_can't_ donate money. They have no problems paying $600 for a copy of MS Word
(meh, it's deductible), but the managers/accountants would pitch a fit if you
donated $6 of corporate money to whatever the currently popular OSS knockoff
of Word is.

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endtime
If I thought there was any chance of them creating a decent competitor to
Office, I'd consider donating. Can anyone persuade me this is the case?

The "free as in beer" argument doesn't work when you're asking for money, and
while I think "free as in freedom" is nice, if I'm going to donate money there
are other causes that come first for me.

~~~
SwellJoe
It (OpenOffice/Libre Office) is already a decent competitor to Office. I've
used it for a decade or so. The last version of Office I purchased and used
was Office 97.

That said, this particular group of folks might not have had a significant
hand in developing that decent competitor. I don't know enough about it to
know if they're the people I should be donating to. Forks are complicated that
way. I'm a little suspicious of them needing 50k right off the bat like this,
but it's been a long time since I've followed development or the people
involved very closely. It's such a huge project, it probably _does_ need a
reasonably large and funded organization to really push it forward, and I
obviously wouldn't trust Oracle to do it.

We are, however, probably reaching the end of life for desktop-based office
suites. I use Google docs for writing everything except books at this point,
and I've considered trying it for a collaborative book, as well. Likewise
spreadsheets...I haven't made a spreadsheet in OpenOffice in a couple of
years. The free software fanatic in me worries about this move to a platform I
have no control over, but the convenience and power of online editing is hard
to beat.

~~~
endtime
I've used Office too, and currently use 2010. I've also used OOo, and I'm
sorry but it's really not competitive. If you haven't used Office since 97
(three or four versions ago) then I don't know how you can justify having an
opinion how OOo/LO compare.

~~~
SwellJoe
Let's just say that there is nothing I need an office suite to do that
OpenOffice couldn't do five or even ten years ago. I'm not a heavy office
suite kinda user, but I have written two books in OpenOffice (one published),
without major complaint.

These days, as I mentioned, I use Google docs for most stuff, and that's
dramatically less capable than either MS Office _or_ OpenOffice. I simply
don't need millions of features to get the work done.

I think the relevance of desktop office suites is fading rapidly, and with it
the need for Office _or_ OpenOffice. (Though I do wonder if I could write a
book for publication at this point in Google Docs and have editors/publishers
be happy with that decision.)

~~~
endtime
As mkr-hn said, the UI in Office is far better. OOo has also always seemed to
have perf issues for me - Office feels much snappier.

~~~
ams6110
MS Office lost me when they rolled out the "ribbon" UI. I never understood it,
and still have to hunt around for ten minutes any time I want to do something
that's not visible.

Granted, this is because I've never been much of an Office user. But over the
years I came to know where pretty much all the features were in the "classic"
Office menus. When MS threw that out and put in a radically different UI, I
decided that my minimal word processing needs did not justify the pain of re-
learning the app.

~~~
mkr-hn
Ribbon rev. 1 was a mess. People hated the first Office that shipped with it,
and for good reason.

And, perplexingly, MS listened.

You can add and remove things on the ribbon in the same way you do with the
toolbar configurator in Firefox.

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joe_the_user
Both Open Source Desktop and web startups give a lot out for free. Web
startups have massively succeeded at times. It don't see why an Open Source
Desktop startup couldn't succeed _if_ it started out with the aim to disrupt
rather than to copy.

What I would like to see is someone formulate a plan for a series of small
and/or more modular tools that could be used instead for office purpose
_instead of_ a massive office suite.

Open source seems doom to lose in a race to create Microsoft-style monster
applications. And this isn't to deny the usefulness of MS Office or Open
Office.

But an approach that could play to the strengths of Open Source would be
needed if you want to _win_.

Creating a good browser is possible if not easy because the browser is
modestly well-defined application.

Inkscape is the best open source GUI app I know of. Indeed it's app that isn't
_bad_. As far as I can tell, a factor that let's it be good is that it's
objective and domain are really well defined.

It would be nice to see people focus Open Development modular tools with a
standard, well-defined domain. Those are the apps that the most enjoyable to
program too.

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mcantelon
Sorry, I'd rather donate to developers rather than, indirectly, to lawyers.

~~~
moondowner
If the lawyers don't set the ground what will the developers work on to? The
developers, all contributors, and users of LibreOffice need this.

~~~
mcantelon
LibreOffice is the first foundation I've seen attempting to solicit this kind
of money just to set up. I would suggest that LibreOffice talk to other
project foundations and get advice on how to do this for less than $50K euros.

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ldng
Why an expensive Foundation ? Non profit organisation isn't enough ? Do they
the plan to be imitating the MozFo / MozCo or Wikipedia system ? They do look
like to money laundry system at times to me. I'm not a huge fan from a FOSS
point of view.

~~~
benatkin
Some things really do vary between countries.

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rebelde
Geez. They should incorporate (or form a non-profit) somewhere where it is
closer to $500 instead of €50,000. My Delaware Registered Agent does all the
paperwork for $329, and I think it can be even cheaper if you register on your
own.

~~~
Maakuth
I don't think it's about the cost of paperwork. I assume they get to keep the
money, and the point with this requirement is that something's actually going
to happen in the Stiftung with this kind of money. Wikipedia has more
information about the topic[1]. They seem to say there that the 50k€ isn't a
strict requirement, but more like a recommendation.

1: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiftung#Germany>

~~~
rebelde
I realized that they get to keep the money, or at least most of it. Just it
seems like an recommendation/requirement that shouldn't exist. Despite this, I
think it makes a great excuse to get 50,000€ in the bank, which can help in
other ways.

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ajarmoniuk
No.

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maxharris
No.

