 Okay, so let's talk quickly about LibreOffice. It's almost 10 years. It looks like yesterday, but it's almost 10 years since we launched the project. But although it's 10 years almost, we still receive a lot of questions on why we launched LibreOffice. So we have explained that in multiple places, but then we realized that that never happened at Fosnum. So I try to make it clear some points. This is more or less the history explained. So everyone, we have an heritage in OpenOffice that was created in 2000 and was basically ended his life in 2011. And OpenOffice was forked twice, was forked by LibreOffice and was forked by Apache OpenOffice. This has to be clear. Apache OpenOffice was a fork. They changed the license completely. So this is a fork. It's not a continuation. The history of OpenOffice is rather well known. It was started in the year 2000 when San acquired Star Division, a German product. OpenOffice was developed in Hamburg with a number of developers that were employees of this company, Star Division. Star Division was acquired by San, and San decided to donate the source code to the open source community. At that time, open source was already popular, but OpenOffice was the first, we can say, end user-facing product that was donated to the open source community. OpenOffice is on the desktop. At the time, most of the open source software was on the servers, and of course you had the email, but the relationship between the end user and the software, I can tell you, is radically different in the case of OpenOffice and LibreOffice today, for instance, of Thunderbird. And in October 2008, OpenOffice 3 was released, and we can consider OpenOffice 3 as the father of the modern OpenOffice and LibreOffice. But the reality is that the relationship between San and community members was not always ideal, was probably perceived as ideal outside the project, but was not ideal inside the project. So in 2005, the members of the community started to challenge San on something that was not really working. The reality is that there was a community council with seven members, three members elected by San, three members elected by the community, and the community member that should have been Superpartis, and reality was a kind of, in Italian we say Zerbino, which is when you enter your house, you have that tapestry where you clean your feet, and that was the position of the community manager versus San. So it was even more loyal to San than San employees. So the reality is that all discussion were four to three, because there were always four votes for San and three for the community. So anything that was suggested by the community was not then put into being. So one year after, this happened in Capodistria at the conference in Capodistria, one year after San felt the need of explaining something, so they made a presentation, and this is a famous slide from this presentation, because they say we will reduce the code complexity. If you look at the code of OpenOffice in 2005, someone that is not a developer will be frightened, and a developer will start thinking about who has developed that code. Improvement of patch handling. There is a famous patch that was, let's say, frozen in a repository for 28 months before being approved, and the patch was a patch that allowed Calc to become, to improve the compatibility with Excel. It was not making a clone of Excel, which is something that many people would like to have, they would like to have a clone instead of a product that has its own originality, but improved dramatically the compatibility. So it was very important, but because the guy was not, let's say he was not community compliant according to San, then his patch was frozen for 28 months. So the day it was merged, it was old. It was okay, but it was old. This guy is Kohei Yoshida, is still a LibreOffice contributor, and the last one was Mentor in Nubis. OpenOffice code is rather complex, and today is as complex as well. So if you want new contributors, you have to mentor them to get into the code. So this is what we are trying to do at the moment. Then in 2000, so the community and San were discussing. So it was not completely friendly. For instance, I entered the OpenOffice community in 2004. I have been a marketer for all of my life and an ITEC marketing project as a consultant. So when I entered the community, I started doing marketing of OpenOffice in Italy. And then one day I got a nice email from San marketing director and he said, can you please stop sending out your press releases because the press picks up your press releases and doesn't pick up San press releases. And he said, two answers. First, you can fire me whenever you want. Second, fire the PR agency of San. Because if the PR agency is not able to write a good press release, then if the fault is not mine, it's the PR agency. Of course he said, but you are a volunteer. He said, you got the problem. You cannot fire me. So in 2009, this happened. Oragola acquired San. But the community that started to think about the fork, what did? At that time, we just pitted up the discussions. This happened just before the conference in Orvieto. Orvieto is a city in Italy. He was one of the organizers of the conference in Orvieto. And I said, let's look at what happens. If Oracle sends a manager that has a budget, okay, that can mean that they are interested in the project. If they send someone that has not a budget, I've been an executive in American corporations. So I know what it means. If you have a budget, you count something. If you don't have a budget, you are at zero in the reality. Sorry to say for those people that do not have a budget, but it's useless that we tell us things that are not true. So they sent a very nice guy without a budget. And I said, okay, so it's better that we really fork the project. So we basically reverted the paradigm. So San was a nice umbrella for the community, but we decided to revert the umbrella. And this is a friend of mine, he's American. So in America there is the mixed symbol paradigm. We use more, at least in southern Europe, the boat where we say everyone has to row in the same direction. But the concept is the same. So we empower the community. So on September 28, 2010, we forked. And we announced the project, and we announced the Document Foundation. This is the very first page of the website. Of course, this is obsolete, and the website is different today. But the reality is that we structured the community according to what was our experience. So first decision. We will never, never, never have a community manager. It was the most hated person in the community. So you don't want a community manager. If he's the most hated person in the community, you don't want another one. And we decided to create a foundation for historical reason. The foundation was based in Germany. And any foundation law is different than anyone as good size and bad size. So having a foundation in Germany is not better than having it in the States and vice versa. Probably it's less flexible to have it in Germany. But on the other side, the solidity is probably higher because you need to have, to demonstrate that you have reserves for years, which is not true for 501s in the States. So we create a foundation where we have members. And we have, this is not updated to yesterday, but I mean we have 2006 members, not 2010, because membership is one year and can be renewed if you continue to contribute. So to members, to people that apply for membership, we ask if they contributed in the past six months, and we ask if they plan to contribute in the next six months. Of course we know that they are volunteers. So we don't want a signature on a contract. But at least a mindset that says, for the next six months I will do something in the community. And then we have a membership committee that evaluates memberships. And then we have a board of directors. And these are two formal bodies. So both bodies control each other. In a sense that to be a director you have to be a member. So it's true that you are independent in taking your decision, but of course the membership committee can check if you are respecting the status, you are respecting the basic principles of the community. Then we have an advisory board. Advisory board companies can are both not-for-profit, and of course if they are not-for-profit, we have Free Software Foundation, Free Software Foundation Europe, KDE, GNOME, and if they are not-for-profit they don't pay anything of course. Then we have companies. Companies that are members of the ecosystem and they pay according to their turnover. But what they pay is not a substantial amount of money because we wanted to have an independent project. So we didn't want to have any company being able to tell, I put one million dollars on the table so I have a say in how you do or you manage the community. So basically the community and the money that we have, I'm partially paid by TDF. We have three full-time employees and several consultants. We are controlled by the two organisms that are in the foundation. Most of our revenues are based on donations. So far they've been rather organic. We will start to do some more serious fundraising just because the project has grown and we need more money to grow further the project. The other companies are either contributing to the project or they have an interest. So we have Red Hat for instance but we have Collabora and CIB that are companies that contribute to the development. So what we decided to have as the principles, these are the five. So copy-left license, no contributor agreement, based on meritocracy, community governance and vendor independence. In both membership committee and board of directors we have a barrier on 30% of the votes. So no company can control more than 30% of the votes of both bodies. This means that if there are representatives of a company either they are so good to convince the others that what they propose is for the good of the project or what they would like to see implemented will not be implemented. And of course it has to be clear that although it looks like we are only focused on LibreOffice we do a lot more in terms of for instance our local communities do a lot of education about open source. I'm a member of course of the Italian, in addition to be a founder and a member of the global community I'm a member of the Italian community and I'm speaking almost every week in schools about free software, digital citizenship. I almost never speak only about LibreOffice because we think that we have one of our roles as open source advocates has to be to increase the open source awareness in general open source and open standards. So this is what we were aiming and I think that we achieved more or less what we were aiming. Of course you know LibreOffice I hope that you use LibreOffice although we are rather democratic we only, if you don't use LibreOffice I won't greet you anymore in my life but that's the simple thing that I will do. What the developers have done because we have something that I don't know if it's common but for now for nine years in a row we have three or more developers each month and this is thanks to the senior developers have created easy stuff to do easy contribution, have picked up really cherry picked in the code something that was easy and accessible to people and we have called them easy acts and they are renewed periodically so you have always new easy acts and easy acts have the objective of lowering the barrier to entry because the barrier to entry to a 7.5 million lines of code beast can be quite high. So this has been one of the big achievements I think we use time based release I think that everyone is conscious of that seeing two major release and every year since almost forever we have achieved something of the things that the community was asking to send in 2005, 2006 so mentoring new people making it easier to access the code remove deprecated libraries if you look at the code today is dramatically different from the code that we have inherited in 2010 but then what happened and this of course happened a few years ago in 2011 we when of course when we created the foundation we invited all the stakeholders to be member of the foundation and this was the answer so they donated open office to Apache foundation and people think that this was an oracle move and then why don't you ask a couple of questions on this fact so IBM usually takes 15 days to write a press release and in 20 minutes after open office was donated to Apache foundation they issued a press release three blog entries quoting each other and linked to each other and the call that they did one week before ended with we will kill you I did not say that they told me we will kill you and I said sorry I won't be able to close IBM although I would like to do that but at least you will not have a nice time in front of you and I'm not happy to say that I won because this is not the way that open source should work but the reality is that the first peculiarity of LibreOffice is that the first first project supposed to be killed by another first project intentionally created for that and this is something that still continues today there is a gentleman that today has tweeted incredibly idiot stuff sorry I would like to meet him but he's not here at Fosman because I would like to tell him how idiot he is we have an extremely large community without a community manager the software is localized in over 120 110 languages we have around 200 million of users worldwide 100 million unique and the other 100 are probably using more than one office suite the project is self-sustaining and it's really vendor independent we have a huge amount of fun and as I said we have attracted three or more developers for I was counting months before but now we counting years so it's I think around 100 months in a row which I think is rather outstanding as a result and that was my last slide if you have questions I would be happy to answer if you don't have I'm happy to have finished do you have any fear about the fact that IBM both Red Hat for the LibreOffice and the OpenOffice okay so just make it clear that what I'm answering is totally personal okay it's not representing in any way the document foundation so I have been a consultant to IBM it's the only company I wrote a letter saying sorry my Libre doesn't want to be your consultant I hate IBM as a company okay I really fear about Red Hat that's personal again that's really personal completely personal but IBM guys know that I'm not the one that doesn't tell things in face to people because I think that their attitude to open source is tactical they they've spent a lot of money on open source but they didn't invest in the community and if you are a community member you understand how important is the community we have always respected Red Hat as a company making profit on one side but also helping the community and living with the community in the other one and if you are a community member you know that the the usual concept of the corporation that says I'm the one leading doesn't work I've tried to make to explain it in this way I've been an executive vice president of annual corporation when annual was a large IT company so just to make a comparison I'm the same person just after almost let's say 35 years later I'm 65 now and I was 30 let's say that in a virtual world me I met myself 30 years ago I would go to shake the hand and the me 30 years ago would take a gun and shot me okay because I was very corporate at that time but the world has changed and I've changed with the world corporation don't always change with the world and I think is a challenge for corporation but I've not seen many of them taking this so seriously and I can say that for instance I see more effort in Microsoft than in other companies in understanding open source which I think is very positive they make effort of course they start from a completely different point of view but at least they try to do it in a way any other question who knows me know that to stop me speaking you have to shoot me but anyway that would be against the core of the product okay so you mentioned that you specifically did not want to have a contributor agreement could you perhaps elaborate as to why that was important sorry can you speak louder I can try you said that it was a specific goal so I'm not a developer so this was a decision from developers it was part of lowering the barrier to entry they looked at other projects and they saw that when the contributor agreement was not in place the barrier to entry for new people was lower of course we filtered if you don't have a contributor agreement you need a filter somewhere not a filter for people but a filter for quality of course because then you don't have any formal agreement between yourself and the person so what the senior developers are doing they are really overseeing new patches from new contributors in a way that they not only are quality assured but the contributor feels as part of the community so we let's say that we try to create a virtual contributor agreement based on gentlemen agreements between people and not a formal one there is some kind of agreement but it's not written on paper