 Okay. Good afternoon. He says, leading me. So my name is Simon Phipps. I'm going to talk to you about how we keep the prospect of a floss desktop alive. So I'll dive fairly quickly into that. So I don't, who remembers Sunsight? Anyone here remember Sunsight? You obviously would. So many years ago some microsystems gave computer systems to universities across all over the world. And they were used for setting up Usenet. So if you ever accessed Usenet, the chances are that if you were accessing a service or downloading a file you would go to a Sunsight. And by enabling people to use Unix on Sunsight, some microsystems created really the wave of adoption of Unix systems, rather than what had been there in the past when I was at university, which was DEC PDP 11s and their successors. And so by making sure that what people were using for their routine lives was a Unix system that pretty much created the drive to then use it for research, to use it for business applications. And this is the origin of the, this is the fertile ground in which then the Linux movement grew when Linux came into existence. And this is by way of noting that what people use is important. Let's click there. The desktop is crucial. Everybody is running a desktop of some sort somewhere. Now at the moment I would suggest to you that the floss desktop has won. It won around about seven years ago. Because the desktop almost everyone is using is running on Linux. It's not running on the local laptop, but it's running on Linux on a server somewhere. And everyone is using that Linux desktop. But that new experience of the Linux desktop isn't creating end user freedom. Because the use of that Linux desktop is tied to your relationship with whoever the service provider is. Now if we want to create a free society, we need to make sure that ordinary people who have not necessarily got the skills to run a server data centre of their own have got access to ordinary tools. And if we're going to do that we need to make sure that they are familiar with something other than what the big providers are making available. I think that the floss desktop is essential because it trains users to want control over their own world. It creates an environment where developers can use tools that are under their control. And it gives you a way to not be under corporate control if that's what you want in your life. Personally I do. Now how have we got here? Well open source and free software has been paid for largely by corporations. That's because they have typically employed people who either as their job or as a side effect of their job cause the software to come into existence and be sustained. Typically the way that corporations have funded this is by charging for a service or by charging for access to the software. And that has then allowed them to pay for development to take place. Now the world has gradually been changing. And what that's meant is that well we're all going to cloud. And cloud adoption is if anything driving open source adoption but not on the desktop. It's driving open source in the stack. It's driving open source for containers and for cloud management. But on the desktop we're seeing desktop tools replaced by cloud tools. And those are tools that have no respect for your user freedom. And then there is an even bigger problem with this. Because this means that the money that would pay for the floss desktop to be developed is no longer coming into the ecosystem. So people are using all of these components systems and component sustainability has got a posse. There are people out there who are making sure that even though business models are moving away from service contracts for medium sized companies there are still ways of funding open SSL or libraries or cloud stacks. But we have a problem. There is no posse for desktop productivity. There is no one who wants to pay for it. And the ability to make money from desktop productivity software is declining. It's getting harder and harder to set up a business that makes money from the existence of productivity software. And consequently communities like the Libre office community or like the open office community are finding that there is there's negligible investment. Because there's no one able to make money from the existence of the software. And so there's therefore no one to invest in the software. So what are we going to do about that? Well the document foundation over the last few years has been experimenting with sustainability. And we've had two projects that are of interest in this space. The first one I'm going to talk to you about is about de jure standards and particularly the ODF standard. And the second one is to do with leveraging app stores to fund development. So the first thing to talk to you about is a project that's called COSM. COSM is an acronym that means community of ODF specification maintainers. Now what we discovered a few years back was that all of the impetus to create a maintained version of the open document format standard went away. IBM exited the document market. Lotus gradually declined to nothing. And most importantly that meant that IBM withdrew the editor who was editing the ODF spec. And so we went for eight years without a new release of the open document format. Not because no one was interested in it, the TC was still working and there were still improvements and fixes being made. But there was nobody to pay for the standards editor to create a new version of the specification. And so we decided to do something about that. And we created what I think is the first crowd funded open standards project. The document foundation put some seed funding in. We put in nearly 30,000 euros of seed funding. And that was structured as a 10,000 euro grant and then 20,000 euros of matching funds for anyone else who wanted to donate. And we successfully got donations from Microsoft and from Collabra and from CIB and from the UK government and then in the end from the European Commission. And as a result of that we were able to hire a highly respected independent editor and he took all of the contributions from the TC and built the ODF 1.3 specification. That went through the ratification process at the standards body OASIS and it became an official standard on Christmas Day on December 25th. So there is now an official ODF 1.3 specification and the next step in the process is for us to implement it. And so the LibreOffice community is committed to implementing that as soon as possible. I hope it's going to be by the summer. And I also believe that we'll see that implemented by some other implementers. Microsoft has said that they intend to implement it and I'm hoping that we'll hear from Google that they intend to implement it as well. So ODF 1.3 which had been dead because of a lack of corporate investment has come back to life because a community has got around it and crowdfunded producing a new version of the spec. We're going to carry on with this work. ODF 1.4 has got a feature cut off at the beginning of the third quarter this year and then ODF 1.4 will hopefully be edited into a standard with a target of the end of 2022 maybe 2023. So we're back on track having a regular cadence for the fixing of defects in the standard and it's a very complicated standard where people are finding defects the whole time. Typically they're not the kind of defects that you're normally dealing with. They're misplaced font usage and incorrect indent and things but they're still considered to be defects by the standards community. And then there's new work that is taking place that needs to be implemented in the standard so that we have interoperability between different implementations notably between LibreOffice and Microsoft Office or LibreOffice and Google Docs. So that's the first project that we've worked on. The second project that we're working on is in progress at the moment. It's called the document collective. We kept on running up against the problem within the document foundation that it was very difficult to spend money on developing LibreOffice because we're a community of developers and users. You don't want to have the foundation which is facilitating the community, competing with the commercial providers within the community. And so working out how to spend some of our quite substantial income on software development proved to be really difficult. We discussed how to do it for years and years and we kept on getting gridlocked on things like conflict of interest questions between board members. And so we decided around about a year ago that we would create an independent charity-like organization to fundraise and then spend the money on LibreOffice development. And the effect of that work is I think called the document collective. And so what are we going to do? Well these are the outline words. We're going to do commercial activities that complement the community rather than compete with it. We're going to try and grow the market for LibreOffice and for ODF and we're going to try and make sure that it's self-funded so it's not reliant on charity. But what are we actually going to do? Well here's some problem statements we'd like to solve. As I said, TDF and any charity finds commercial activity challenging. The Apache Software Foundation really could never engage in commercial activity. It could never divert donations to Apache into paid for work by one of the Apache Foundation's top level projects. And this especially affects the market that is evolving at the moment where the motivations of people to pay contributors in the community are gradually declining. And then we have another problem that we're facing which is that end users who are the main target of LibreOffice are finding it increasingly difficult to install it. That's not because there's a problem with our installer. That's because Microsoft and Apple are increasingly locking down installation. They're now requiring signed packages signed in a particular way. They're requiring a chain of notarization for the signatures. They're preferring the download location of their App Store. And it is now the case that someone downloading something like LibreOffice or OpenOffice, if they haven't got technical skills, is finding it extremely challenging to install the software. If you watch the user help mailing lists for OpenOffice or LibreOffice, you'll find that every day there are multiple questions from end users on how to install an update to the software that they're already using. So these are not beginners. These are people who already have the software and are trying to install it. So we'd like to solve that problem. Now for a charity to solve this problem, it's kind of challenging because the App Store is a hostile commercial environment for a charity, for a group of volunteers. The rules of the App Stores are extremely complex and change every few minutes. You can discover that the filtering that goes on on the content of the packages results in just arbitrary removal of your packages from the App Store with the expectation that you have a developer team waiting to respond to the arbitrary change of rules. And this makes for putting open source software, end user software, into the App Stores very difficult. That's independently of any issues about the compatibility of the license terms with open source licenses. It's just operationally extremely challenging. And then even if we were to solve this problem, this is a problem for the Document Foundation because most of the Document Foundation's income comes from people making donations while their download is in progress. When's the best time to ask for a donation? It's when people have got a little bit of spare time and are feeling grateful. When does that happen? What happens while the 700 meg download is in progress? So the Document Foundation for a number of years now has put up a little box while the download is in progress saying, have you considered maybe donating a little money? And people do. But if people were downloading from the App Store that would not be happening. And so that is another challenge to us. So we want to try and do something about those challenges and that's what TDC is going to do. TDC is going to be granted an exclusive license to the quite valuable LibreOffice mark. And as the agent of the Document Foundation, TDC will place paid for packages for LibreOffice in the Windows and Mac App Stores while clearly stating that the same package is available at no charge from the LibreOffice website. The reason we're doing that is because we're going to have to spend money on building those packages specifically for the App Store. And it's going to be quite expensive to do. We'll be spending thousands of dollars on developer time each release. And we will also have an admin burden of dealing with the App Store. I have family members who work in other companies who have apps in App Stores. And they tell me they have between one to two people who work full time dealing with the detritus that washes back from the App Store as they get new reviews of new releases as the rules about what you can say in the listing change as responses to take down requests from competitors come in. So we think it's very reasonable to charge. We've done some A-B testing about what to charge and we believe that the right price is around 15 euros. And we believe that that shouldn't just be for one download. That should be for updates for an extended period. So this will be a payment that gives you access to the App Store downloads until the next major release comes out. Which is a well known number in LibreOffice world. That's about 18 months. And so that's a reasonable amount of usage. And then we'll suggest people would like to purchase the next major version when it comes out. So what will we then do with the money? So this is where the tricky bit thing comes in. How do you prioritize new features? One thing you could do is bugzilla voting. Now bugzilla has had voting for a long time and if you use bugzilla you'll know that the sophisticated end users spend a lot of their time voting up things that they would like to see fixed. They put many, many votes into the system and the reason they do that is because the votes are completely free and there are no consequences to voting. No one is going to come around and ask you to follow up your vote with some form of commitment. So we're not going to do that. What we're going to do is first of all I envisage, we haven't commissioned it yet, a plugin for bugzilla that will let you promote a feature or a bug from our bugzilla onto a marketplace. And you'll be able to do that using your credit card. And having promoted a feature into the marketplace then anyone that wants to can come to the marketplace and vote up the features they would like to see implemented. And again you'll be able to purchase as many votes as you wish. Now I feel this is unlikely still to result in an income enough to pay for the features so this is not a typical crowdfunding environment. But I am hoping that if we're selling the packages on the app store that there will be a substantial revenue that comes in that will allow us to pay for features. So to sum up what we're going to try and do in just a couple of lines we're going to build a new free software desktop and we're going to get the windows users to pay for it. You may have heard that phrase before in a different context I don't know. Now that sounds as unreasonable as it did when it was said by the original president who said it but I think this could actually work. So we're going to go ahead and incorporate TDC we'll skip over that. TDC is going to be a separate company at arms length from the document foundation one reason to do that is because selling any software involves being exposed to a good deal of risk from the software marketplace as soon as you make money you are a target for unwanted activity from competitors and from patent holders in particular and so we want to contain that risk and make sure that the document foundation is not impacted by it. So TDC will be a separate entity but we also don't want to make it a separate commercial company that could go off the rails. So we're going to use a community serving business structure that does not have shareholders does not have a beneficial owner so there's no way to distribute any surplus in the form of dividends or other payments upstream. It's going to be a commercial operation with a small board of directors who will be compensated for their contributions to the degree that they contribute and it's going to be incorporated using a regulated vehicle so the bylaws can't be changed and my chosen vehicle because I live in the UK is a community interest company in the UK. There don't appear to be any bad consequences of Brexit from doing this because all of the interfacing to the rest of the world will be through the Microsoft and Mac app stores and the contractual relationships outbound with contractors to do the feature implementations. I'm trusting that spending money on IT contracting is not going to be made impossible by Brexit although who knows just how crazy it will end up being. The only control line if you will back to the document foundation is the commercial trademark license and so the document foundation will if we go off the rails we'll be able to say you can't use that name anymore and I believe that that is going to be a significant disadvantage if we were not able to call the packages in the app store LibreOffice because it's very hard to distinguish yourself from the large number of other packages that are in that store already. So what are we going to do next? Well we're ready to incorporate. I'm just writing the CIC statement and the bylaws at the moment. We've got a steering group that the TDF board has appointed and I'll ask them to appoint a CEO and a set of probably three directors to steer the next stage of the company and at that point it will be commercially staffed and operated and floating free from the document foundation. The working title is the document collective hence TDC. Everyone seems to like that name and so that's probably what we'll call ourselves until it proves to be bad for some reason. Now I think these are this all sounds very basic and straightforward when I explain it and there is some work in the market already in doing similar things so CRETA and VLC have also leveraged app stores to create revenue from their communities very successfully. The main innovation in here I think will be doing that and then coming up with a community driven way of spending the money and I'm very hopeful that that will end up being a positive experience as well. If you don't agree my email address is down here you're welcome to let me know about it. When we eventually launch which I hope will be the middle of the year sometime I would love it if you would help with the inevitable questions. I know the very first question that will come up on slash dot is you can't sell free software and so if you would like to be the person that answers that question on slash dot I'd be very grateful. So that's everything that I was going to say to you. We have four or five minutes for questions. Does anyone have any questions? You have said windows would pay for I mean you can trade windows or Apple. I know I keep projects for example they do that same thing they let I think they generously pay Apple users so the concept is working but do you think can we also be done on Linux? I mean Ubuntu or for example try to have some app store and there's a popular I think widespread thing. Do you target these two also? So I think I don't think it's going to likely to be useful on Linux but what we're really cladding for is the convenience of not having to work out how to install the package. And that need doesn't exist on Linux it's installing the package is extremely easy. I've even got it on my Chromebook. So and there's no point trying to create the artificial scarcity. So I now I hope Linux LibreOffice users will continue to make donations and that would be very handy because the document foundation does need a certain amount of money to continue doing its administration and to pay the admin staff so we do want money to continue to flow into the document foundation as well and it would be great if we had Linux users contributing there to be honest with you Linux users are not the dominant contributors to the document foundation's income. Even at the moment most of our income comes from the proprietary platform users and so if anyone's got ideas for ways to encourage the Linux community to contribute more financially we're very happy to get contributing kind as well so document foundation has got a large and vibrant and active community and there's plenty of entry points to work on the code but honestly most Linux users who have LibreOffice installed don't want to work on the code they want to work on the invoice with it rather than on some code so for those people a way to encourage donations will be very welcome and there are TDF staff in the room who will take your suggestions any of them can take your credit card so I think that would be a great thing to do so one of the things that happened when we were discussing this on the board is once we had established the idea that maybe it was a good idea to have an arms length commercial entity people started saying well we could do this as well now why don't we get that entity to run the conference why don't we get that entity to pay the staff who don't work in Germany why don't we get that entity to run certification exams I'm not at all opposed to that idea I'd just like to make this work first and then move on to some other things if the overall community thinks that's a good idea I don't think everything ought to be in an arms length entity so I disagree with employing staff from there the staff that aren't working for TDC from there for example but I could see paid certification exams I mean that's working very well for Linux foundation who have a lot of well they're a little different the model I would try and pick up would probably be the Linux foundation's model and I'd probably want to partner with LPI to do the content and I'd probably want to get TDC to try and arrange for there to be training and exams around the world but that's a way out in 2022-2023 please at the moment we don't even have an employee so I'm going to get this fixed first hopefully this is going to work hopefully it will be successful I think we'll know by the middle of 2022 I think that's kind of when I would want to say well shall we do some more things and then I can do or I better I can do the talk at a related FOSDM about what a terrible failure it was because by then I will have retired and you know I'll be able to do a retrospective on my successes and failures we could take one more question as the room changes anyone else want to do anything Olivia they will just see the same package that's on the LibreOffice website now it won't actually be the same package because to make it work on the app store we have to do some sandboxing of some of the capabilities and we have to sign it differently but when you start it up it will have the same splash screen it will have all the same functions and features and it will look just like the identical product that's on the store our goal is to have it be released at the same time as the main packages and our goal is also to have it promoted by TDF as the official build for users who would rather have installation maintained for them OK, over to Core, thanks very much Why sir?