Starting The Document Collective

The Document Foundation (TDF) is the home of the LibreOffice free-software office suite; it provides financial, governance, and other administrative services to LibreOffice. The foundation was established in part to ensure that commercial entities did not have undue influence on the project, which limited the types of activities in which it can engage. In particular, selling branded versions of LibreOffice in the macOS and Windows app stores has not been something that TDF could tackle. The TDF board of directors is looking to change that with the creation of a new entity, The Document Collective (TDC), to engage in commercial activity that is complementary to that of TDF members—hopefully as an income source to help support TDF.

The TDC proposal [PDF] was adopted by the TDF board on September 9 and unveiled at the LibreOffice conference (slides [PDF]) and in a post to the board-discuss mailing list on September 11. The board has decided to start the creation of TDC by appointing a transitional leadership group. The TDC leadership has been directed to set up an unincorporated association as part of Public Software CIC, which is a European umbrella organization (a "community interest company" or CIC) that provides administrative services to free and open-source software projects. That is meant to be a temporary measure until a full legal entity can be set up. TDC will also have €50,000 in funds available to draw on from TDF; the money is a loan that is meant to be repaid with interest from the proceeds of selling LibreOffice in the app stores. There may be other moneymaking activities that TDC ends up undertaking as well.

TDC is tasked with getting LibreOffice into the app stores for macOS and Windows. To that end, Public Software CIC will be granted a trademark license for the LibreOffice mark that can be used for app store packages. Initially there will be no separate TDC entity, but that will eventually be set up in some European jurisdiction and all of the TDC work that has been done will be transferred to the new entity. Effectively, the agreement with Public Software CIC will just allow TDC to start working immediately while it initializes its governance and legal entity in parallel.

There were a few comments on the announcement. Uwe Altmann wondered about the business plan for TDC; given that there is already some experience from two companies selling LibreOffice in the app stores, it would seem reasonable to put together an initial budget, for example. In addition, starting out by setting up an association with Public Software CIC with a fairly large budget seemed unnecessary; there are other organizational structures that could be set up more easily and cheaply, he said.

Michael Meeks, who is a TDF board member and part of the TDC transitional leadership, suggested that Altmann attend the next board meeting to raise his concerns. But he also had some thoughts on the budget and organizational issues:

Thomas Meyer was concerned about possible conflicts of interest, which Altmann also mentioned. Simon Phipps, who is a TDF board deputy, is also one of the founders of Public Software CIC and its only director. Phipps responded by describing his role in both organizations:

Meyer did not seem entirely mollified by that explanation, but Phipps said that he would not be voting on the proposal as part of the TDF board. Furthermore, the appearance of a conflict of interest in a small, focused community is relatively common:

Meyer's main concern seems to be that Phipps was proposed as one of the members of the TDC leadership group. Since then, the TDF board met again on September 27; most of the public part of that meeting was taken up with the TDC question. From those minutes, it would seem that there was some confusion about the resolution that was announced; another, slightly revamped version of the resolution was posted for a public vote on September 30. At the board meeting, Phipps said that he did not need to be part of the TDC leadership group; he suggested that Nicolas Christener be the leader of that group. In addition, Altmann was added, so the proposed leadership group is those two plus Meeks and TDF board members Eike Rathke and Thorsten Behrens. As of this writing, the public vote on the TDC resolution has garnered four "+1" votes and an abstention from Phipps.

TDF has had difficulty in signing up with the app stores from a contractual standpoint, but two companies, Collabora and CIB, have already been testing the waters with "Vanilla LibreOffice" packages in the app stores. Since each of those companies has representatives on the TDF board, the income potential for official packages in the app stores is presumably already known; a price point of around €15 has been chosen based on their experience. With its exclusive license, TDC will be able to collect the revenue stream from the app stores. Whatever money is generated can be used to fund the new organization, to pay back any funds borrowed from TDF, and, eventually, for donations to TDF directly. Meanwhile, users who are willing to go the traditional download and install route can get the office suite from the LibreOffice web site for no cost as usual.

It would seem that this proposal has been in the works for some time, but has just seen the light of day in the community. From the outside, it seems a bit surprising that TDF needs to spin out a subsidiary (of sorts) in order to add LibreOffice to app stores. It is also somewhat unexpected that there might be enough revenue from selling convenience, effectively, in that the program can be freely installed outside the app stores—perhaps that is the way of the world these days, however. In any case, finding better ways to fund and support important free-software projects like LibreOffice can only be seen as a good thing; with luck TDC will be a raging success that helps fund lots more work over the coming years.

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