 Hi everyone, I'm very happy, very pleased to be able to talk to you today. It's a new role for me. I'm now here talking to you as the owner and founder of Allotropia. We're a very young company, so it's even more important to be here on stage and I will start with the keynote talking a little bit about the new company. As an aside, you see that, or maybe you even hear that in the background. We're here in Hamburg, hosted by a housing project. Thanks for having us with a small group of German hackers, a few more to come in the next two days. And we're trying this hybrid thing for the first time. It didn't quite work out for the first try for this talk, so I hope it's getting better and we're learning and improving as we go. Okay, so without further ado, let's start. Quick introduction, who we are. We are based in Hamburg, just started January this year, so start up for a young company. And we are a spin-off of CIB, my former company, so we essentially just took the free and open source people there, the team, spun out a new company and are now exclusively focused on free and open source software. Leadership team myself and my former boss, LeBrandtner, was also a co-investor in the new company. Our team right now is a core team of seven people, certified LeBrandtner developers, collectively more than 70 years of experience with a code base. And we do pretty much everything from core development and C++ over to Java, Python, basic, including training for other developers for extension or integration development. We do deployments, migrations, we are active in the standardization landscape, so we do mostly ODF, but also a bit of OXML standards work. And we do all this, yeah, whatever you have to do to be regarded as modern in terms of DevOps and secure development processes. Our partners, that's why we're here, why we're able to work and provide what we can, because we have strong partners, first and foremost, CIB, the kind of parent company or co-investor, still partner for sales and for consulting, mostly for scaling up if there's a need, the workforce, pretty solid old medium-sized company in Germany based in Munich, 23 million turnover, 2019, more than 180 employees, and doing everything that is in the area of document management, recently also with AI support. Second partner, I'm very happy about that, Collabora, Michael already mentioned it. Very important partnership for us for being able to have a full feature offering in the product scape for online and mobile, and also having a product and technology partnership, and I'm quite happy that that works out for that area. Beyond that, we have partners for trainings and migrations, most, if not all of them, from the divided liberal office ecosystem, most of them also certified. So what are we offering? What is actually our business model, which is first and predominantly liberal office consulting? So it's the classic, you have a free product or open source product, and you offer services around that like consultancy, bug fixing, future development, support trainings, and that's what we do, and also long term support. The second product we have is an LTS version, which is still under the CIB brand, which is well established under TDF license, and we have desktop version for Windows and Linux with volume license agreements, and we do custom and bespoke changes in that branch. And of course, which is the major point, we do regular security updates on that version. Additionally, that version is also available in the Windows Store, if you like to buy that. Beyond that, we are members or affiliated with a number of organizations. The most important I'd like to list here is open source business alliance, which is the German speaking areas, a lobby organization. We are OASIS member and some sponsoring one editor in the ODFTC. And last, but definitely not least, we are affiliated in very, very many ways with liberal office and the document foundation. I'm on the board. Other people are contributing code standardization work, other things, both in their paid and in their spare time, and we're also members of the advisory board of the document foundation. Right. So that's in all briefness, a quick walkthrough to what Allotropia is doing. I'm not alone. I'm here, and I'm very proud with a team of wonderful people, and some of them here, some of them still coming. Many of them will have talks over the conference, so you can see them on stage either or as prerecorded, but then chat with them in the coming three days. You know all of them. It's Michael, it's Jan Marek, it's Samuel, it's Asili, it's Armin, and a number of more to come there in the next time, so we're actually growing and hiring for selective positions. Okay, but since I'm not here to sell the company to you, it's mostly just to introduce you to what we're doing. Let me instead use the time and spend a few minutes and a few moments on personal thoughts while I have the stage. Because with the new role here and a bit of time to reflect and also with discussions we had on the board and discussions we had in the community, I came to think about what it means to be LibreOffice, what it means to be being involved with that code base and with that project for so very many years, and there have been many for me. So, I started back in the day, it's almost, it's a bit more than 20 years ago, I started in spring 2001 at San Microsystems working on OpenOffice, and I've been purely engineering nothing much else. So I was a paid engineer working on the code base and talking to community people, learning, learned about their worries and their problems and their challenges, and also getting quite some insight into how a big corporation works that sponsors an open source project. I moved on to SUSE then, where my responsibilities also grew into standards work, but also still mostly engineering, but I was suddenly on the other side of the fence. So I was in a comparatively small team, I had to talk to this big Sun team and trying to get my code changes accepted. And, yeah, it was interesting because it was quite different and things that I saw, I didn't see as a problem before in the Sun role, I didn't notice actually there are a problem if you are in a different role. And then I moved on again inside SUSE, so I stopped being paid for doing liberal office work, and instead was contributing in my free time, and it was in my paid time I was doing other open source work. So there was another change in perspective when suddenly I learned what it means to have very limited time at your hands, and not having the liberty and the privilege to contribute all your paid time. And then again, some change came and I moved to CAB and was again, well, not really being paid, so I had to earn, I was leading a team of liberal office developers, I had to earn the money, mostly to pay for the team. So again, different perspectives and different roles and I was growing into sales and marketing and other areas. And then finally, with the start of this year, I founded my own company and I'm now really responsible for getting the money in to pay the people. And so the newest, the latest change was more that of an investor, so taking on money, taking life savings, founding a company, hiring people, paying them to work on open office and liberal office. And again, a change in perspective and again, surprising insights into problems that I didn't notice were problems before. So bottom line, what I think I'm trying to get across here is that the perspectives matter greatly. And everybody has a bias, everybody, and then it includes me. So take whatever I say here, whatever I'm telling you with a big grain of salt. It's hard to imagine or it's actually, it's not easy to walk a mile into some other person's shoes. And I think with the experience, with the past experience that I made, it's worthwhile to assume best intentions on the other side. It's probably fair to say that almost everybody who's working in this community is working as of today is working here and still around because they care a lot about your office. They also might care about their personal income, they might care about their investments, but at least one of the motivators clearly is that people care about liberal office. Very seldomly things are purely evil. I would rather venture the guess that they're never purely evil, but just things, decisions, ways to do things really differ depending on your role that you're in. And if you find something weird that I'm doing or that my team is doing, then assume that's there for a reason and not because we want to annoy someone or because we're doing something nefarious. And then maybe let's, instead of people being upset and not talking, let's just get into a talk. Good. So to condense that a little bit into something perhaps more tangible. From my experience, what are volunteers doing broadly? So this is more like for the investors and the employees and the staff people among the audience here. Put yourself, try to put yourself into the shoes of a volunteer. What are, what is the driving there? What is the problem? Usually broadly don't want to say that's always the case. There's always exceptions to that rule, but broadly volunteers have very limited time at their hands. So what they tend to do is something that is usually not massive, or if it's a massive change, then it's a change they can do bit by bit, little by little, because there's only so much you can do with a complex code base. And just a few hours in the evening, you can't do the level of rework, the level of refactoring, given the same education, the same capabilities, the same smartness, compared to somebody who's doing that eight, nine, 10 hours every day. So that's kind of natural selection now, what volunteers tend to do, what it's important work, and it's work that, on the other hand, most of the paid developers, at least historically didn't do, because there was no business reason, for example, to do it. So all the cleanups, all the improvements, all the smaller changes that might not get the paying customer to do them. Those are wonderful things that our volunteers are doing. On the other hand, the way that the volunteers work, of course, for the paid developers, or for those, or perhaps for TDF as an organization, there's always this, will this volunteer be still around the next year? Will the massive change this person has been doing in their spare time and now once merged, once that lands, will that person still be around and maintain that in half a year or in a year's time, or fix the bugs, inevitable regressions. And that's this tension there that builds up, why sometimes there's pushback in the review for a massive change, or why somebody thinks that it should be a bit more polished, or it should be, it's too risky to merge as one large atomic change and rather once it's split down and easily reversible, if necessary. And on the other hand, the volunteers perhaps being frustrated by the scope base still being so complex and the build still taking so long and all the spare time energy being sapped by those silly obstacles and they really don't want to have fun and be productive. Paid contributors. I mean, most of the time they, they, you would expect they do what they're told to do. So what the employer or their customers is paying them to do. But as I said, that's probably for almost everybody active in liberal office. Most of the, I would say, or all the paid contributors are also volunteers, because they, most of them contribute and there's bad time they go well beyond what what I would expect from an employee in answering questions, helping, helping volunteers, reviewing codes, talking nicely about liberal office and really working much more than than they're paid for. So, and then they're frustrated if they're just put into this, this bucket of, oh, you're just, you're just a paid person and kind of not a not a true volunteer. And, and I think we're not not treating them fairly when we do that. And on the other hand, of course, they are in a privileged position. So when, when talking to volunteers and assuming that those people would perhaps have the same time and and could could invest the same amount of work into publishing their code as they can themselves like expecting the same standards, it's perhaps equally problematic and off putting for a volunteer. So again, try to put yourself into the other person's shoes, change perspective, try to understand what the other person thinks or drives. At least investors to some extent that that's what I am so I put significant amounts of money into this. So, why am I here, is it just for the money, or am I just a very charitable person and I don't want. To see my life savings back. Well, in reality, it's for me, almost exclusively, I can deeply about the project and the people and open source. That's the only way for me to continue what I did before, perhaps on a different level with a bit more control and say, and what I do and how I do it and when I do it and with whom. So, I'm definitely not here for the money beyond the fact that of course I have a family who needs to eat. And that's my motivation. I'm pretty sure that's that's kind of similar to a lot of people who put money into into open source and especially who put money into liberal office development. But it's not exclusively so we had contributors who were probably venture capital driven, and they were purely for the return of investment, which is fair enough. And at the end of the day, that's how the world works. And at the end of the day, if it's not worthwhile. Putting your money there then perhaps something is wrong with the project if there's no future if there's nothing that can be gained from it. And again, but of course, again, then the perspective changes and you realize that if a lot of money is at stake, that perhaps a few decisions a few things, how you do that, or when you do that, or what you expect in return when you, when you do something actually changes as well. So again, I'm asking for a bit of understanding that with a change in role, perhaps a few things are more important for me than there were before. But I do promise that I will try to remember the different roles I've been in. And if I forget, please remind me. Okay, so that's all from that bet. And I think the most important I save the last is some please all of you do enjoy liberal office conference. I will. I hope that we can meet each other in person again the next year. Yeah, let's be careful with each other. Let's stay safe and healthy. I wish you all the wonderful conference. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for your words. I really understand you since I am my own, let's say, from, you know, 2022 years, not that big, but anyway, I can partly understand your worries and I'm with you and I really share your words. Then, anyway, there are seven minutes left. And I'm watching if there are any questions but I can't at the moment see any questions in the in the chat room, the chart of the room one, nor in the main chart. So I invite anyone who may want to to prompt a question to do it now, possibly on room one shot. I don't know if there are questions from the audience there. I heard someone screaming. I would, unless there's questions, I'll probably just go on mute you as a little bit of background noise. We're in the chat space here. I see a question, not in the right place, but by the way, the question is, if the company name means something from Colin, the company name. Yes, absolutely. It's kind of a, it's not a real world, but it's some, it's some, it's a made of word, but it's some related to allotropes, which is some way of chemical elements to exist in very different shapes or forms. So, so I really like that idea. And there's also this this this buckyball on the, there was the buckyball on the second slide. Let me quickly call this up. So for example, carbon comes in different, different forms that essentially it's the same element, but it has very, very different chemical and physical characteristics. For example, diamonds, that's carbon graphite, that's carbon as well. And buckyballs is also carbon, which is really what LibreOffice code base also shows. So you find LibreOffice in so very many different shapes or forms. Sometimes you don't even recognize it, but it's included in the, in the product or in the software. Sometimes it's obvious it's LibreOffice that you install, but you install it on your mobile phone, you install it on your, on your desktop, you install it on your server. So I like that metaphor. So that's where the name came from. And by the way, I guess it is not a coincidence that the language is C and the carbon is C as well, the very same symbol. Yeah, I'm sure we can, we can spin a lot of stories around that. So the good thing with those metaphors is that they're quite malleable. And if they're abstract enough, you find, you find lots of connections. But yes, absolutely. C++ that's in there. Indeed. I can't remember in chemical, it should be for the linking possibilities of carbon. So C++ should be C++++ to be chemical equivalent, but jokes apart.