- github.ioZola2023-08-21T08:00:00+02:00https://bjoernmichaelsen.github.io/originally-published-on/github-io/atom.xmlHow to survive being bought by Oracle2023-08-21T08:00:00+02:002023-08-21T08:00:00+02:00https://bjoernmichaelsen.github.io/blog/survive-oracle/<h1 id="how-to-survive-being-bought-by-oracle">How to survive being bought by Oracle?</h1>
<p>When I wrote <a href="https://bjoernmichaelsen.github.io/blog/tdf-okrs/">Quo vadis with The Document
Foundation?</a> a month ago,
that was mostly a side product of sorting out my thoughts on open source
governance in general, and on LibreOffice in particular. And while that sparked
some discussion on the identity of the LibreOffice project, mostly <a href="https://community.documentfoundation.org/t/ideas-around-tdfs-future/11436/88">here on
Board
Discuss</a>,
it ultimately was preparation for a talk Thorsten and me had submitted for a
vacation on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_Communication_Camp">Chaos Communication Camp
2023</a>. Our preparation
was somewhat <em>chaotic</em> -- because both Thorsten and me decided to get very
creative about the "dont come by car" suggestion by the organizers and our talk
being scheduled on the first day of the event -- so we ended up honouring the
LibreOffice tradition of finishing slides only hours before the scheduled slot.</p>
<p><a href="https://media.ccc.de/v/camp2023-57278-how_to_survive_being_sold_to_oracle"><img style="width:100%" src="/img/gh/cccamp2023.jpg"/></a></p>
<p>The session itself did not seem to have suffered too much by this -- it was
more free form, which might actually have been a bonus. We ended up even being
allowed to use some extra time for Q&A as there was quite some interest for
that in the audience.</p>
<p>The video recording can be found on
<a href="https://media.ccc.de/v/camp2023-57278-how_to_survive_being_sold_to_oracle">media.ccc.de</a>
and describes both bits of the history of the LibreOffice fork a decade ago and
lessons learned that are still relevant for open source communities forking (or
otherwise reorganizing themselves) today.</p>
<iframe width="1024" height="576" src="https://media.ccc.de/v/camp2023-57278-how_to_survive_being_sold_to_oracle/oembed" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<p>A huge thank you to all the volunteers that made #CCCamp23 (and therefore this
talk) happen, especially <a href="https://chaos.social/@c3voc">c3voc</a> for the recording
and <a href="https://chaos.social/@c3cert">c3cert</a> who did a great job in checking a
minor injury I suffered due to my own stupidity during the event.</p>
<p><strong>Comments? Feedback? Additions? Most welcome <a href="https://chaos.social/@Sweetshark/110921168077626062">here on the fediverse</a></strong> <img style="width:1.5em" src="/img/gh/mastodon.svg"/> <strong>!</strong></p>
Quo vadis with the Document Foundation?2023-07-28T00:00:00+00:002023-07-28T00:00:00+00:00https://bjoernmichaelsen.github.io/blog/tdf-okrs/<h1 id="quo-vadis-with-the-document-foundation">Quo vadis with the Document Foundation?</h1>
<p style="text-align:right;"><em>"Where do you want to go today?"</em></p>
<p style="text-align:right;"><em><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jij5Nzh2Sj4">Microsoft Commercial 1998</a></em></p>
<p>At the Document Foundation -- the entity behind LibreOffice -- the board is
currently considering introducing a staff policy, and is asking for ideas,
comments and feedback.</p>
<p><strong>tl;dr:</strong> <em>Starting from the foundations statutes and organizational setup, I
will be pointing out some easy to make common mistakes (some literally lost in
translation) in finding the foundations core values. I believe only with that,
a constructive discussion of how trustees, board and staff of the foundation
can improve their interactions and alignment. I also made a concrete proposal
on board-discuss to start a discussion on possible concrete measures there --
this post provides the more abstract background going along with that.</em></p>
<p>There seems to be quite some confusion about how the different bodies of the
foundation should interact with each other. The different bodies being:</p>
<ul>
<li>the staff of the foundation</li>
<li>the board of directors</li>
<li>the membership committee</li>
<li>the trustees of the foundation</li>
</ul>
<p>To summarize as short as I can: The trustees are those who contributed to the
projects of the foundation and thus gain active voting rights. The membership
committee has been elected by the trustees to be the judges on those
contributions: they decides who is and will continue to be a trustee. The board
of directors is elected by the trustees too. This grants them special
privileges and duties: The most important privilege is to control the
foundation resources, consisting mainly of two groups: funds created from
donations and salaries to pay staff. While staff or directors not being
trustees is possible, for the most part they are likely privileged trustees:
Unlike other trustees staff are paid for their contributions and directors can
allocate the foundations resources.</p>
<p>Now, one might think both the board and the staff are purely bound by the
statutes of the foundation and their conscience. However, for directors this is
clearly not the only limit on their decisions, at least if they want to be
reelected by the trustees again. For the staff, there are also limits: The
directors -- who have the duty to control the resources of the foundation need
to be convinced that spending donations on staff salaries is the best use for
the goals of the foundation as set in the statutes and understood by the
trustees.</p>
<p>Now, the foundation is older than a decade by now and its goal are both quite
broad and ... partially outdated. This makes "statutes and conscience" alone not
a good guideline to achieve focused progress. <em>What to focus on?</em></p>
<p>As a starting point, lets have a look at the preamble of the foundations
statutes, which starts with this paragraph:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The objective of the foundation is the promotion and development of office
software available for use by anyone free of charge. The foundation promotes
a sustainable, independent and meritocratic community for the international
development of free and open source software based on open standards.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is one of the shortest possible descriptions of the foundations goal. And
even with this it requires some explanation and amendments:</p>
<ul>
<li>The translation to <em>promotion</em> is a bit misleading. It is still the most
likely word to use in this context for the "Foerderung" in the German
original, but it loses a lot of additional meanings that are still there in
the German context. Namely it also means: advancement, furtherance, boost and
funding.</li>
<li>Likewise, the translation to <em>free of charge</em> is misleading. The German
original says "zur freien Nutzung" which does not have to specifically mean
"free as in beer". It can also mean "free as in freedom" -- especially in
this context.</li>
<li>Finally, this paragraph cannot really be split and cherry-picked even in its
two sentences: The first sentence alone does not describe the goals of the
foundation at all. For example, it would apply the same way to e.g. onlyoffice
these days. This is because second sentence contains the core of what is
supposed to set LibreOffice and other projects of the foundation apart:
<em>sustainable community</em>, <em>international development</em>, <em>open source</em> and <em>open
standards</em> are core to the foundations mission -- as are <em>independence</em> and
<em>meritocracy</em>(*).</li>
</ul>
<p>The second paragraph is mostly redundant: It clarifies what "office software"
means ("repertoire ... of tools") and what "open source" means ("openly
available for free use") and also talks about "distribution" ... which is a bit
funny as software distribution mostly stopped being a problem quickly even
while foundation was created: even <a href="https://canonical.com/blog/shipit-comes-to-an-end">Canonical stopped shipping Ubuntu CDs in
2011</a> and today everyone can
distribute software of epic sizes via Docker hub or quay.io or ghcr.io.</p>
<p>Ok, so ... the first paragraph of the statutes of the foundation (mostly the
second sentence) are a great starting point to define the goals of the
foundation. Good! Does this mean using this as a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_principle">first
principle</a> means trustees, board
members and staff are aligned and focused on the same goal? Unfortunately not.</p>
<p>Even with the extensive comments given above, the goals of the foundation are
so broad compared to the resources of it, that they will never ensure alignment
by themselves -- much less an strong focus and effective effort. Do not get me
wrong: Compared to other open source NGOs, the Document Foundation is quite
rich -- but its goals are still overwhelmingly broad and diverse. Is this a
problem? In a way, yes: It means two trustees can work on the goals of the
foundation and still consider the work of the other ... not that important.</p>
<p>Between volunteers that might be somewhat acceptable: who is to judge
contributions of others if they were volunteered? But with both directors and
staff its ... different. Both have been trusted by the other trustees with
additional privileges: The staff with the privilege to be -- unlike others --
to be paid for their project contributions. The directors are mostly graced
with the privilege allocate funds (which ultimately includes staff salaries).
So <em>both</em> directors and staff need to answer to a higher standard than other
volunteers (who are judged by the membership committee). And here is where a
need for alignment and focus comes in.</p>
<p>And that brings me back to the opening of this post: staff policy. I wonder if
transparency about the focus, alignment of goals and allocation of resources
(namely: funds and work time) would be helpful when it allows:</p>
<ul>
<li>directors a way to report to the trustee on how they intend to allocate and
focus resources of the foundation, and the latter to gain better
understanding on whom to vote for in upcoming elections.</li>
<li>staff a way to report to the directors and the latter (as representatives of
the trustees) way to guide and align the former.</li>
</ul>
<p>This alone would not solve all problems with alignment, but it would be a
start. One medium to bring about such transparency could be <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectives_and_key_results">Objectives and
Keyresults (OKRs)</a>.</p>
<p>How would OKRs help at TDF? Well, OKRs should generally be set in a way that
they are assumed to be on average 70% complete by the end of the period.
Evaluation at the end of the period will allow to:</p>
<ul>
<li>help build a shared understanding between all trustees of what goals are
under- or overestimated in how hard they are to achieve.</li>
<li>help to reallocate resources to areas that are promising faster.</li>
<li>help reduce frustrations about impossible goals or underappreciated work.</li>
</ul>
<p>A concrete draft proposal for how that could be implemented has been suggested
<a href="https://community.documentfoundation.org/t/asking-your-input/9543/4?u=sweetshark">here</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Comments? Feedback? Additions? Most welcome <a href="https://chaos.social/@Sweetshark/110787323464201803">here on the fediverse</a></strong> <img style="width:1.5em" src="/img/gh/mastodon.svg"/> <strong>!</strong></p>
<p>(*) Urgh, long footnote incoming on why I will leave aside discussing these latter two hot button topics in this post as (in summary):</p>
<ul>
<li><em>meritocracy</em> has been justly criticized to deepen inequality -- <a href="https://bookwyrm.social/book/508177/s/the-meritocracy-trap">there are
books about it</a>:
"merit" is way easier to establish for the privileged. So when judging merit,
privilege (or lack thereof) has to be taken into account.</li>
<li><em>independence</em> has recently been often used in populist claims of "conflict
of interest" to subvert individuals of merit in the LibreOffice community --
that is: those that did contribute to the advancement, furtherance and
funding of open source, open standard office software development.</li>
<li>now "conflicts of interest" clearly should not be ignored, especially if they
counter the foundations goals. However, when doing so, its wise to start with
those that receive the biggest net benefit from the foundations use of its
resources (and note in this that e.g. volunteer development contributions and
trademarks likely provide widely bigger benefits than a few tenders the
foundation might have offered).</li>
</ul>
Moved from wordpress2023-05-23T00:00:00+00:002023-05-24T05:02:13+00:00https://bjoernmichaelsen.github.io/blog/moved-from-wordpress/<h1 id="moved-from-wordpress">Moved from wordpress</h1>
<p>As announced in the last post on my <a href="https://skyfromme.wordpress.com/2023/05/21/moved-my-blog-to-github-io/">wordpress
blog</a>,
I moved my blog to <a href="https://bjoernmichaelsen.github.io">https://bjoernmichaelsen.github.io</a>.
The old content from wordpress and the even older one has been (hopefully with
only limited losses) migrated and mirrored on the new site too. Both old and
new content will be available on the new site free of ads: Accidentally
browsing the internet without an ad-blocker, I found the old sites to be
annoyingly tainted by those.</p>
<p>Some background:</p>
<ul>
<li>The site is generated from a <a href="https://skyfromme.wordpress.com/2023/05/21/moved-my-blog-to-github-io/">github repository</a>
with an automatic <a href="https://github.com/bjoernmichaelsen/zola-deploy-action">github workflow</a>
I customized from <a href="https://github.com/zbrox">zbrox</a>.</li>
<li>This static site generator is <a href="https://www.getzola.org/">zola</a> using a
<a href="https://github.com/bjoernmichaelsen/zola-clean-blog">customized theme</a> based
on <a href="https://github.com/dave-tucker/zola-clean-blog">Zola Clean Blog by Dave Tucker</a>.</li>
<li>The blog now being a static site, I need a new way to allow for comments and
feedback. These days, the fediverse is the perfect way to do this: It also
allows a discussion without splitting contributions between social media and
on-site comments. <strong>I will thus link to a fediverse post that then can be
replied to at the end of each post from now on.</strong></li>
<li>There are multiple feeds to follow the blog:
<ul>
<li><a href="/categories/">There are multiple categories</a>
that can be followed for specific topics as atom feeds, e.g. for
<a href="https://bjoernmichaelsen.github.io/categories/libreoffice/atom.xml">LibreOffice</a>
that is being used for <a href="https://planet.documentfoundation.org/">Planet TDF</a>.</li>
<li>If you are interested in all new content regardless of topic, there is also
<a href="/originally-published-on/github-io/atom.xml">a feed for all new posts on this site</a>.
In addition, there are feeds for the content that was mirrored here --
although I hardly expect those to update.</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<p>Now I only need to start again to regularly write long(er) reads. I am
intending to do that though.</p>
<p><strong>Comments? Feedback? Additions? Most welcome <a href="https://chaos.social/@Sweetshark/110419964941462924">here on the fediverse</a></strong> <img style="width:1.5em" src="/img/gh/mastodon.svg"/> <strong>!</strong></p>