LibreOffice: the origins of a community fork
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Vignoli, Italo
LibreOffice was announced in September 2010 as a fork of OOo, by a group of active members of the OOo community who were worried by Oracle acquiring Sun. They decided to create an organization capable of growing the LibreOffice project based on five founding principles: copyleft license, no contributor agreement, meritocracy, independence from vendor(s), and community governance. The talk will cover the history and governance peculiarities of The Document Foundation. The Document Foundation (TDF), based in Germany, is the not for profit home of LibreOffice and the Document Liberation projects. Although is a German foundation, it has members who are at the same time the owners of the foundation and those who decide the governance, as they elect the Board of Directors and the Membership Committee from a list of candidates who have to be TDF members. TDF is based on five founding principles: copyleft license, no contributor agreement, meritocracy, independence from vendor(s), and community governance. Governance and statutes are hevily influenced by the previous experience at OOo, i.e. there isn't any community manager, there aren't any formal roles, and there isn't any formal mechanism for involving people (which makes people involvement a challenge). On the other hand, the community is growing nicely even without these people being appointed and a specific mechanism, but of course there are some issues like in any other community. The talk will briefly summarize the challenges we had to face in term of governance, and hopefully foster a discussion on the topic.
 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 its 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 and in the case, 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 super partes and reality was a kind of, in Italian we say zerbino, which is the, 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 open office 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 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 Kohai Yoshida, is still a LibreOffice contributor. And the last one was Mentoring Newbies. Open Office 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 Open Office community in 2004. I have been a marketer for all of my life and handling ITech marketing project as a consultant. So when I entered the community, I started doing marketing of Open Office in Italy. And then I got 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 I 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, is 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. Or a go acquire 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. I 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 is not a budget, I've been an executive in American corporation. So I know what it means. If you have a budget, you count something. If you don't have a budget, you are a zero in the reality. Sorry to say for those people that do not have a budget, but this is, 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 is American. So in America, there is the mixing bold paradigm. We use more at least in Southern Europe, the both 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 you, 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, 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 is 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, it's, we have 2006 members, not 2010, because membership is one year and can be renewed if you continue to contribute. So when two members, two 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 it's, we don't want a, a signature on a contract, but at least, you know, mindset that says for the next six months, I will do something in the community. And then we have a membership committee that is the, the committee that evaluates memberships. And then we have a board of director. And the two, and these are two formal bodies. So each, 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, you, 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 pro, we have a free software foundation, free software foundation Europe, Katie 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, to their turnover. But the, 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, to tell, I put, you know, $1 million 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 a part, partially paid by TDF. We have three full-time employees and several consultants. We are controlled by the two, the two, uh, organism that are in the foundation. And 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. And the other companies, so are either contributing to the project or they have an interest. So we have Red Hat, for instance, uh, but we have Collabora and CIB that are companies that contribute to the development. So what we decided to have in, uh, as the principles, these are the five, so copy left license, no contributor agreement, based on meritocracy, community governance and vendor independence. In both, uh, membership committee and, uh, board of directors, we have, uh, a barrier on 30% of the votes. So any, no company can control more than 30% of the votes of both, uh, bodies. Uh, 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 be, see implemented will not be implemented. Uh, and of course, uh, it has to be clear that although it looks like we are only focused on, uh, LibreOffice, uh, 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, uh, 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 as to be, as to increase the open source awareness in general, open source and open standards. So this is, uh, uh, what we were, uh, uh, aiming and, uh, I think that we achieved more or less what we were aiming. Um, of course, uh, you know, LibreOffice, I hope that you use LibreOffice, although we are rather democratic. We only, uh, we, we, we only not, we will, I want, 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. Uh, what the developers have done because we have, we have something that I, 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, uh, every month. And this is thanks to the, the, the senior developers have created easy stuff to do, easy contribution, have picked up in, uh, really cherry-picked in the, in the code, something that was easy and accessible to people. So, and we have called them easy acts and they're renewed periodically. So you have always new easy acts and easy acts, uh, have the objective of lowering the barrier to entry because the barrier to entry to a 7.5 million lines of code, uh, beast, uh, can be quite high. So this has been, uh, uh, one of the big achievement I think, uh, we use time-based release. I think that everyone is conscious of that, seeing two major release and every year since, uh, 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 in, uh, that we have inherited in 2010. Uh, but then what happened? And this of course happened a few years ago in 2011. We went, 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, uh, open office to Apache foundation and people thinks that this was an Oracle move. And then, uh, 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. Uh, but at least, uh, you will have, you will not have a nice time in front of you. And, uh, I'm not happy to say that I won because this is not the way that open source should work. Uh, but the reality is that, uh, the first peculiarity of LibreOffice is that the first false project supposed to be killed by another false project intentionally created for that. And this is something that still continues today. There is a gentleman that today has tweeted and incredibly idiot stuff. Sorry. Uh, I would like to meet him, but it's not here at Fosman because I would like to tell him how idiot it is. Uh, 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 UD and the other 100 are probably using more than one office suite. Uh, 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, uh, I was counting months before, but now we counting years. So it's, uh, uh, I think more 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. Um, do you have any fear about the fact that I am both red hats for the, for the liberal office and the open office? Uh, okay. So the, 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 liver 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 that I think that their attitude to open source is tactical. They, 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, we have always respected red hat as a company making profit on one side, but also helping the community on the end and living with the community on the other one. And if you are a community member, you know that the, the, the, the usual concept of the corporation that says I'm the one leading doesn't work. I've tried to make to, to explain it in, in this way. I've been an executive vice president of annual corporation when annual was a large IT company. So just to, to make the, the, the, the comparison, I'm, 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 an, in, in, in, in a virtual world, me, I met myself 30 years ago. I would go to shake the hand and the, 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, uh, 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, they start from a completely different point of view, but at least they try to do it in a proper way. Any other question? Who knows me, not that to stop me speaking, you have to shoot me, but anyway. That would be against the core of 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, can you speak louder? I can try. Um, you said that it was a specific goal not to have a contributor agreement. Can you explain why that was important? Uh, so I'm not a developer. So this was a decision from developers. Uh, it was part of lowering the barrier to entry. Uh, they, they looked at other projects and they've saw that when the contributor agreement was not in place, the barrier to entry for new people was lower. Of course, uh, uh, we filtered. We, 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 you, you don't, then you don't have any formal agreement between yourself and the person. So what the, the, the senior developers are doing, they are really overseeing, uh, new patches from new contributors in a way that they not only are quality assured, but the, the contributor feels as part of the community. So we, let's say that we try to create a, a, a virtual contributor agreement based on, uh, gentlemen agreements between people and not a formal one. There is some kind of agreement, but it's not written on paper. Thank you.
 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 its  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 and in the case, 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 super partes  and reality was a kind of, in Italian we say zerbino, which is the, 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 open office 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 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 Kohai Yoshida,  is still a LibreOffice contributor. And the last one was Mentoring Newbies. Open Office  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 Open Office community in 2004. I have been a marketer  for all of my life and handling ITech marketing project as a consultant. So when I entered  the community, I started doing marketing of Open Office in Italy. And then I got 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 I 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, is 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.  Or a go acquire 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. I 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  is not a budget, I've been an executive in American corporation. So I know what it means.  If you have a budget, you count something. If you don't have a budget, you are a zero  in the reality. Sorry to say for those people that do not have a budget, but this is, 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 is American. So in America, there is the mixing  bold paradigm. We use more at least in Southern Europe, the both 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 you, 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, 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 is 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, it's,  we have 2006 members, not 2010, because membership is one year and can be renewed if you continue  to contribute. So when two members, two 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 it's, we don't want a, a signature  on a contract, but at least, you know, mindset that says for the next six months, I will  do something in the community. And then we have a membership committee that is the, the  committee that evaluates memberships. And then we have a board of director. And the two,  and these are two formal bodies. So each, 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, you, 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 pro, we have a free software foundation, free software  foundation Europe, Katie 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, to their turnover. But the, 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, to tell, I put, you know, $1 million 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 a part, partially paid by TDF. We have three full-time employees  and several consultants. We are controlled by the two, the two, uh, organism that are  in the foundation. And 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. And the other companies, so are  either contributing to the project or they have an interest. So we have Red Hat, for  instance, uh, but we have Collabora and CIB that are companies that contribute to the  development. So what we decided to have in, uh, as the principles, these are the five,  so copy left license, no contributor agreement, based on meritocracy, community governance  and vendor independence. In both, uh, membership committee and, uh, board of directors, we  have, uh, a barrier on 30% of the votes. So any, no company can control more than 30%  of the votes of both, uh, bodies. Uh, 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 be, see implemented will not be implemented.  Uh, and of course, uh, it has to be clear that although it looks like we are only focused  on, uh, LibreOffice, uh, 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, uh, 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 as to be, as to increase the open source awareness in general, open  source and open standards. So this is, uh, uh, what we were, uh, uh, aiming and, uh,  I think that we achieved more or less what we were aiming. Um, of course, uh, you know,  LibreOffice, I hope that you use LibreOffice, although we are rather democratic. We only,  uh, we, we, we only not, we will, I want, 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. Uh, what the developers  have done because we have, we have something that I, 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, uh, every month.  And this is thanks to the, the, the senior developers have created easy stuff to do,  easy contribution, have picked up in, uh, really cherry-picked in the, in the code,  something that was easy and accessible to people. So, and we have called them easy acts  and they're renewed periodically. So you have always new easy acts and easy acts, uh, have  the objective of lowering the barrier to entry because the barrier to entry to a 7.5 million  lines of code, uh, beast, uh, can be quite high. So this has been, uh, uh, one of the  big achievement I think, uh, we use time-based release. I think that everyone is conscious  of that, seeing two major release and every year since, uh, 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 in, uh, that we have  inherited in 2010. Uh, but then what happened? And this of course happened a few years ago  in 2011. We went, 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, uh, open office  to Apache foundation and people thinks that this was an Oracle move. And then, uh, 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. Uh, but at least, uh, you will have, you will not  have a nice time in front of you. And, uh, I'm not happy to say that I won because this  is not the way that open source should work. Uh, but the reality is that, uh, the first  peculiarity of LibreOffice is that the first false project supposed to be killed by another  false project intentionally created for that. And this is something that still continues  today. There is a gentleman that today has tweeted and incredibly idiot stuff. Sorry.  Uh, I would like to meet him, but it's not here at Fosman because I would like to tell  him how idiot it is. Uh, 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 UD and the other 100 are probably using more than one office suite.  Uh, 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, uh, I was counting  months before, but now we counting years. So it's, uh, uh, I think more 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.  Um, do you have any fear about the fact that I am both red hats for the, for the liberal  office and the open office? Uh, okay. So the, 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 liver 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 that I think that their  attitude to open source is tactical. They, 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, we have always respected red hat as a company making  profit on one side, but also helping the community on the end and living with the community on  the other one. And if you are a community member, you know that the, the, the, the usual  concept of the corporation that says I'm the one leading doesn't work. I've tried to make  to, to explain it in, in this way. I've been an executive vice president of annual corporation  when annual was a large IT company. So just to, to make the, the, the, the comparison,  I'm, 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 an, in, in, in, in a virtual world, me, I met myself 30 years  ago. I would go to shake the hand and the, 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, uh, 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, they start from a completely different point of view, but at least they try to do  it in a proper way. Any other question? Who knows me, not that to stop me speaking, you  have to shoot me, but anyway. That would be against the core of 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, can you speak louder? I can try. Um, you said that it was a specific goal  not to have a contributor agreement. Can you explain why that was important? Uh, so I'm  not a developer. So this was a decision from developers. Uh, it was part of lowering the  barrier to entry. Uh, they, they looked at other projects and they've saw that when the  contributor agreement was not in place, the barrier to entry for new people was lower.  Of course, uh, uh, we filtered. We, 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  you, you don't, then you don't have any formal agreement between yourself and the person.  So what the, the, the senior developers are doing, they are really overseeing, uh, new  patches from new contributors in a way that they not only are quality assured, but the,  the contributor feels as part of the community. So we, let's say that we try to create a,  a, a virtual contributor agreement based on, uh, gentlemen agreements between people and  not a formal one. There is some kind of agreement, but it's not written on paper.  Thank you.
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