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><!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
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><H1 CLASS="cjk">Part
>I: Free And Open Source Software Is Gradually Developing Its
>Commercial Ecosystems In Asia</H1>
><ADDRESS CLASS="ä½è-cjk">Author:
>Kuan-Ting Lin</ADDRESS>
><ADDRESS CLASS="ä½è-cjk">Translator:
>Franklin Weng</ADDRESS>
>Foreword:
>LibreOffice Asia Conference had been successfully held in May, 2019
>in Tokyo. Kuan-Ting Lin, a university student and civic tech
>reporter also attended this conference and gives his observation. In
>Part I, Kuan-Ting provides readers who are not familiar with FOSS and
>ODF/LibreOffice a view about how FOSS community runs and how FOSS
>grows its business opportunities and ecosystem.
>On
>June 18, 2019, almost all the government agencies under Taiwanâs
>cabinet received an official document from the National Development
>Council (NDC). &quot;When exchanging digital documents between
>government agencies, the file format shall use Open Document Format
>(ODF) if transferred files are editableâ¦â¦ Do not use
>proprietary editors to directly save as ODF filesâ¦... 
>It is highly recommended to use the NDC ODF Application Tools or
>LibreOffice to generate standard ODF files.&quot;
>&quot;This
>is the most exciting and cheering official documents in recent
>years!&quot; said Dr. Chao-Kuei Hung, a Science
>and Technology Studies (STS)
>researcher and FOSS bred-in-the-bone promoter. In this document,
>users in Taiwan government agencies are asked not to use
>proprietary office suite like Microsoft Office to generate documents,
>and hence can not save and spread &quot;.doc&quot; or &quot;.docx&quot;
>format files, which people are quite familiar with. Instead, they
>are asked to use free and open source software â which permits
>people to download, research, improve and redistribute â like
>LibreOffice, and need to save and transfer documents in ODF format,
>which is an ISO standard (see Part II for details). For most people,
>this seems to be a confusing policy; however it will surely affect
>our lives in the future. For us, it is even as important as metric
>units like kilograms or meters.
><H2 CLASS="cjk">In
>50 Years, From Microsoft To Communities, There Are Huge Changes Of
>Software Ecosystem In Taiwanese Government</H2>
>The
>story begins more than 50 years ago. In the late 1960s, the Taiwanese
>central government introduced the first batch of computers for tax
>data registration. This purchase started the time of Taiwan's
>digital government. With the increasing burden of people using
>computers, the government has been constantly buying and installing
>huge number of Microsoft products
>licenses, among which the Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office had
>a majority. Such unrestrained over-purchase and use of Microsoft
>software had made the government become a subject of criticism by the
>parliament and the supervisory
>court more
>than a decade ago.
>The
>legislators used to hold a press conference in 2002 to question the
>administrative system and pointed out that the Ministry of Justice
>had &quot;illegally allowed Microsoft's bid rigging&quot;. At the
>time, then
>Minister Ding-nan Chen replied that he would &quot;wait for
>other software achieving a certain degree of universality and
>compatibility,&quot; and then the Ministry of Justice &quot;would not
>rule out considering to adopt&quot;, which clearly suggested that
>options other than Microsoft were simply not sufficient for the
>government at that time.
>The
>fact that Taiwanese government's editorial policy changed from the
>early conservative mentality to today's announcement of abandoning
>Microsoft's commercial solutions proves that, free and open source
>office suite developed by the community has already had the ability
>to establish its own &quot;ecosystem&quot;. Companies of different
>fields in this ecosystem provide various government information
>services while meeting the government's high requirements for
>stability and security. However, here is an interesting question: 
>Aren't FOSS community members against commercial companies and
>software? Why do they set up their own company in the ecosystem?
><H2 CLASS="cjk">The
>Formation of FOSS Ecosystem</H2>
>Let's
>get back to the bottom of May, 2019. Many LibreOffice community
>members gathered together in Tokyo, the biggest city of Japan, to
>attend the first LibreOffice Asia Conference, discussing about how
>LibreOffice, which was born and grown up in Europe, could develop in
>Asia, where the culture and policies are quite different.
>Franklin
>Weng from Taiwan, the only Asian member in the Board of Directors of
>The Document Foundation (TDF) â the legal charity entity behind
>LibreOffice â was there too. Franklin has been deeply involved in
>Taiwanese FOSS community, and is also one of the founding members of
>Software Liberty Association Taiwan (SLAT). In early years he simply
>contributed and promoted FOSS in government agencies and schools as a
>volunteer community member. Nevertheless along these years he
>realized that it wasn't enough. &quot;Business and policies needs to
>push each other. Now LibreOffice and ODF are slowly moving toward
>this direction: Policy goes first, then gradually forms the business
>model.&quot;
>Franklin
>started his own business a few years ago, which helps the public
>sectors and other organizations to adopt FOSS solutions. Through the
>community's connections and long-term accumulated trust, Franklin's
>team has successfully co-worked with the National Development Council
>(NDC), the Yilan County Government, and many other central agencies
>in Taiwanese government to provide training courses and consulting
>services. The lecturers who work with Franklin are mostly free
>lancers and are also involved in the FOSS community as deeply as him.
> Therefore, besides teaching the skills of using LibreOffice, the
>lecturers would also share free software concepts and issues with
>users from government agencies.
>The
>integrity of FOSS ecosystem also depends on the integration of other
>fields. Shigenobu Koufugata, a member of the Japanese community who
>lives in Chiba, Japan, purchases old computers, installs
>high-performance, low-cost free software, and then resells the
>renovation to consumers. Consumers of second-hand computers often
>lack certain computer knowledge. Therefore, if consumers can use the
>computers directly after buying them, they can avoid the high
>threshold of downloading and installation procedures. Shigenobu
>believes that it can naturally attract more users to try LibreOffice.
>In
>addition to software training and hardware support, software
>development is of course indispensable in the ecosystem. Italo
>Vignoli, one of the co-founders of TDF, clearly stated, &quot;Our
>main assets are developers.&quot; LibreOffice has hundreds of
>developers since everyone can participate; however more than half of
>the development contributions are made by employees of companies such
>as <A HREF="https://www.collabora.com/">Collabora</A>, <A HREF="https://libreoffice.cib.de/">CIB</A>
>and RedHat. By developing the required functions or customized
>versions of LibreOffice for customers, these companies can get
>profits and feedback to the community at the same time.
>The
><A HREF="http://ossii.com.tw/">Open Source Software Integral
>Institute (OSSII)</A> in Taiwan is one of the few companies to
>provide LibreOffice business service in Chinese-language area. One
>of their products is the &quot;NDC ODF Application Tools&quot; â a
>customized LibreOffice designed for users in Taiwanese government â
> provided by the NDC in Taiwan. The <A HREF="https://en.cpc.com.tw/">CPC
>Corporation, Taiwan</A>, a large (around 16,000 employees)
>state-owned enterprise with 73 years history, is one of their
>customers. In the LibreOffice Asia Conference, Mr. Wen-ke Huang, an
>employee in CPC who is responsible for the infrastructure information
>systems and ODF adoption, <A HREF="https://conf.libreoffice.jp/slides/Wenke%20Huang_Grow%20out%20of%20nothing,%20the%20first%20successful%20experience%20about%20importing%20LibreOffice%20into%20state-owned%20company.pdf">shared
>their experiences</A> and analyzed the reasons and methods to adopt
>ODF and NDC ODF Application Tools.
>Different
>from Microsoft's ecosystem, where companies in it are mainly selling
>licenses and external expansion add-ons, FOSS allows anyone to
>contribute code and even publish their own customized versions. This
>enables community members to participate into the core parts of
>software development. Besides, the grow demands for FOSS application
>training and second-hand hardware also encourages community members
>who expert in different fields to join the ecosystem.
><H2 CLASS="cjk">Commercial
>Company That Is Loyal To The Community</H2>
>Unlike
>normal commercial software companies, FOSS-related companies would
>keep thinking about their responsibilities as members of the
>community while making a profit. Making money is one thing, but since
>the community is the original motivation of the company's founding,
>the two must cooperate with each other.
>The
>first LibreOffice Asia Conference follows this thought. &quot;I
>asked Japanese community about hosting the first LibreOffice Asia
>Conference, because I found that they have a very good and active
>community and hence can go further more to find appropriate business
>models,&quot; said Franklin. &quot;When I attended LibreOffice Kaigi
>or similar events in Japan and presented what we have done in Taiwan,
>they always showed their envy and said that it was very difficult to
>promote LibreOffice and ODF in Japan. However I think that they're
>doing very well; they just need to start thinking and finding more
>business opportunities. So the topic of the first LibreOffice Asia
>Conference was set to business. I hoped that after the discussion of
>the business workshop and certification interview they can have more
>confidence to start moving to business.&quot;
>&quot;Running
>an FOSS-related company gives me not only the ability to contribute
>without any worries in the community, but also to find business
>opportunities for other community members from our experience, and to
>use the operating principles to consolidate the FOSS ecosystem on the
>ground,&quot; Franklin explained additionally.
>Although
>in the LibreOffice ecosystem commercial companies can contribute to
>the community while having profits, the relationship between the
>company and community is not one-way assistance. Sometimes it can be
>tough if the relationship between the two is not good. An obvious
>example is the former OpenOffice.org community and Oracle. A few
>years before Oracle acquired Sun and hence the dominance of software
>development of OpenOffice.org fell into Oracle's hand. It was
>dangerous because Oracle has never been friendly to FOSS, so some
>core OpenOffice.org community members decided to fork LibreOffice and
>found The Document Foundation. &quot;That's why they chose
>foundation as the form of the organization. TDF emphasizes on the
>independence of the organization very much due to the previous
>troubles with Oracle,&quot; said Franklin.
>Italo
>described the differences between the OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice
>communities. &quot;We reverted the paradigm,&quot; said Italo. 
>&quot;This is OpenOffice, the company protects the project. So itâs
>like when it rains, if you are under the umbrella you donât get
>wet. We reverted the umbrella (for LibreOffice), and this is the
>concept of the mixing bowl... We jump on a bowl and we have everyone
>of us toward the same direction.&quot;
>The
>independence of the community is not only reflected in the
>organizational form. Although the development work is mainly carried
>out by commercial companies, TDF still dominates and makes decision
>of the direction of the community and software development. In order
>to keep the independence and avoid conflicts of interests, the
>statues of TDF stipulates that the composition of the Board of
>Directors and Membership Committees must not have more than one-third
>of the members belonging to a single company or organization. With
>such a rigorous management, communities and companies can find the
>right balance for each other.
><H2 CLASS="cjk">Ideals
>And Business Can Cooperate Through Certification</H2>
>At
>the end of the LibreOffice Asia Conference, the LibreOffice
>Certification Committee of The Document Foundation held a public
>interview with several candidates from Taiwan and Japan community. 
>As long as these candidates were approved by the committee, they
>would become âLibreOffice Certified Professional Trainersâ, which
>implies the expert skills and abilities to teach LibreOffice; or
>become &quot;LibreOffice Certified Migration Professionals&quot;, to
>assist organizations to adopt and migrate LibreOffice.
>For
>TDF, the certified migration professionals and professional trainers
>are an important way to promote the concept and develop business. âI
>invited the LibreOffice Certification Committee to attend this
>conference and talk about business. I hope to discuss with the
>community about what can be done, what can be noticed when training,&quot;
>said Franklin, who has been a certified migration professional and
>professional trainer since 2016.
>Eric
>Sun, a TDF member and a candidate in the certification interview this
>time, has won unanimous approvals from the committee and became
>certified migration professionals and professional trainers. Eric
>used to work in Open Source Software Application Consulting Center
>(OSSACC), a project under SLAT, to promote FOSS and public domain
>educational resources in schools. He then co-worked with Franklin to
>promote ODF/LibreOffice and has been the ace lecturer in Franklin's
>team. His getting certified by TDF can no doubt bring him more
>credits and opportunities, both for business and for promoting FOSS.
>LibreOffice
>will be ten years old next year. TDF was founded in the shadow of a
>large commercial company at that time, but those members who set up
>the foundation may not have expected that the seed of document
>liberation and LibreOffice can be spread across the sea to the
>distant Asia and root in the ground, with a philosophy of equal
>emphasis on ideals and profit.
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<H1 CLASS="cjk"><FONT FACE="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><SPAN LANG="en-US">Part
I:  Free And Open Source Software Is Gradually Developing Its
Commercial Ecosystems In Asia</SPAN></FONT></H1>
<ADDRESS CLASS="ä½è-cjk"><FONT FACE="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><SPAN LANG="en-US">Author:
Kuan-Ting Lin</SPAN></FONT></ADDRESS>
<ADDRESS CLASS="ä½è-cjk"><FONT FACE="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><SPAN LANG="en-US">Translator:
Franklin Weng</SPAN></FONT></ADDRESS>
<P CLASS="åæ-cjk"><FONT FACE="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><SPAN LANG="en-US">Foreword:
LibreOffice Asia Conference had been successfully held in May, 2019
in Tokyo.  Kuan-Ting Lin, a university student and civic tech
reporter also attended this conference and gives his observation.  In
Part I, Kuan-Ting provides readers who are not familiar with FOSS and
ODF/LibreOffice a view about how FOSS community runs and how FOSS
grows its business opportunities and ecosystem.</SPAN></FONT></P>
<P CLASS="cjk"><FONT FACE="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><SPAN LANG="en-US">On
June 18, 2019, almost all the government agencies under Taiwanâs
cabinet received an official document from the National Development
Council (NDC).  &quot;When exchanging digital documents between
government agencies, the file format shall use Open Document Format
(ODF) if transferred files are editableâ¦â¦ <B>D</B><B>o not use
proprietary editors to directly save as</B><B> ODF files</B>â¦... 
It is highly recommended to use the NDC ODF Application Tools or
LibreOffice to generate standard ODF files.&quot;</SPAN></FONT></P>
<P CLASS="cjk"><FONT FACE="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><SPAN LANG="en-US">&quot;This
is the most exciting and cheering official documents in recent
years!&quot; said Dr. Chao-Kuei Hung, a <FONT COLOR="#000000">Science
and Technology Studies </FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000">(STS)</FONT>
researcher and FOSS bred-in-the-bone promoter.  In this document,
users in Taiwan government agencies are asked <B>not to</B> use
proprietary office suite like Microsoft Office to generate documents,
and hence can not save and spread &quot;.doc&quot; or &quot;.docx&quot;
format files, which people are quite familiar with.  Instead, they
are asked to use free and open source software â which permits
people to download, research, improve and redistribute â like
LibreOffice, and need to save and transfer documents in ODF format,
which is an ISO standard (see Part II for details).  For most people,
this seems to be a confusing policy; however it will surely affect
our lives in the future.  For us, it is even as important as metric
units like kilograms or meters.</SPAN></FONT></P>
<H2 CLASS="cjk"><FONT FACE="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><SPAN LANG="en-US">In
50 Years, From Microsoft To Communities, There Are Huge Changes Of
Software Ecosystem In Taiwanese Government</SPAN></FONT></H2>
<P CLASS="cjk"><FONT FACE="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><SPAN LANG="en-US">The
story begins more than 50 years ago. In the late 1960s, the Taiwanese
central government introduced the first batch of computers for tax
data registration.  This purchase started the time of Taiwan's
digital government.  With the increasing burden of people using
computers, the government has been constantly buying and installing
huge <FONT COLOR="#c9211e">number</FONT> of Microsoft products
licenses, among which the Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office had
a majority.  Such unrestrained over-purchase and use of Microsoft
software had made the government become a subject of criticism by the
parliament and the <FONT COLOR="#000000">s</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000">upervisory
</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000">c</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000">ourt </FONT>more
than a decade ago.</SPAN></FONT></P>
<P CLASS="cjk"><FONT FACE="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><SPAN LANG="en-US">The
legislators used to hold a press conference in 2002 to question the
administrative system and pointed out that the Ministry of Justice
had &quot;illegally allowed Microsoft's bid rigging&quot;.  At the
time, <FONT COLOR="#000000">the</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000">n</FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000">
</FONT>Minister Ding-nan Chen replied that he would &quot;wait for
other software achieving a certain degree of universality and
compatibility,&quot; and then the Ministry of Justice &quot;would not
rule out considering to adopt&quot;, which clearly suggested that
options other than Microsoft were simply not sufficient for the
government at that time.</SPAN></FONT></P>
<P CLASS="cjk"><FONT FACE="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><SPAN LANG="en-US">The
fact that Taiwanese government's editorial policy changed from the
early conservative mentality to today's announcement of abandoning
Microsoft's commercial solutions proves that, free and open source
office suite developed by the community has already had the ability
to establish its own &quot;ecosystem&quot;.  Companies of different
fields in this ecosystem provide various government information
services while meeting the government's high requirements for
stability and security.  However, here is an interesting question: 
Aren't FOSS community members against commercial companies and
software?  Why do they set up their own company in the ecosystem?</SPAN></FONT></P>
<H2 CLASS="cjk"><FONT FACE="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><SPAN LANG="en-US">The
Formation of FOSS Ecosystem</SPAN></FONT></H2>
<P CLASS="cjk"><FONT FACE="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><SPAN LANG="en-US">Let's
get back to the bottom of May, 2019.  Many LibreOffice community
members gathered together in Tokyo, the biggest city of Japan, to
attend the first LibreOffice Asia Conference, discussing about how
LibreOffice, which was born and grown up in Europe, could develop in
Asia, where the culture and policies are quite different.</SPAN></FONT></P>
<P CLASS="cjk"><FONT FACE="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><SPAN LANG="en-US">Franklin
Weng from Taiwan, the only Asian member in the Board of Directors of
The Document Foundation (TDF) â the legal charity entity behind
LibreOffice â was there too.  Franklin has been deeply involved in
Taiwanese FOSS community, and is also one of the founding members of
Software Liberty Association Taiwan (SLAT).  In early years he simply
contributed and promoted FOSS in government agencies and schools as a
volunteer community member.  Nevertheless along these years he
realized that it wasn't enough.  &quot;Business and policies needs to
push each other.  Now LibreOffice and ODF are slowly moving toward
this direction:  Policy goes first, then gradually forms the business
model.&quot;</SPAN></FONT></P>
<P CLASS="cjk"><FONT FACE="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><SPAN LANG="en-US">Franklin
started his own business a few years ago, which helps the public
sectors and other organizations to adopt FOSS solutions.  Through the
community's connections and long-term accumulated trust, Franklin's
team has successfully co-worked with the National Development Council
(NDC), the Yilan County Government, and many other central agencies
in Taiwanese government to provide training courses and consulting
services.  The lecturers who work with Franklin are mostly free
lancers and are also involved in the FOSS community as deeply as him.
 Therefore, besides teaching the skills of using LibreOffice, the
lecturers would also share free software concepts and issues with
users from government agencies.</SPAN></FONT></P>
<P CLASS="cjk"><FONT FACE="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><SPAN LANG="en-US">The
integrity of FOSS ecosystem also depends on the integration of other
fields.  Shigenobu Koufugata, a member of the Japanese community who
lives in Chiba, Japan, purchases old computers, installs
high-performance, low-cost free software, and then resells the
renovation to consumers.  Consumers of second-hand computers often
lack certain computer knowledge.  Therefore, if consumers can use the
computers directly after buying them, they can avoid the high
threshold of downloading and installation procedures.  Shigenobu
believes that it can naturally attract more users to try LibreOffice.</SPAN></FONT></P>
<P CLASS="cjk"><FONT FACE="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><SPAN LANG="en-US">In
addition to software training and hardware support, software
development is of course indispensable in the ecosystem.  Italo
Vignoli, one of the co-founders of TDF, clearly stated, &quot;Our
main assets are developers.&quot;  LibreOffice has hundreds of
developers since everyone can participate; however more than half of
the development contributions are made by employees of companies such
as <A HREF="https://www.collabora.com/">Collabora</A>, <A HREF="https://libreoffice.cib.de/">CIB</A>
and RedHat.  By developing the required functions or customized
versions of LibreOffice for customers, these companies can get
profits and feedback to the community at the same time.</SPAN></FONT></P>
<P CLASS="cjk"><FONT FACE="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><SPAN LANG="en-US">The
<A HREF="http://ossii.com.tw/">Open Source Software Integral
Institute (OSSII)</A> in Taiwan is one of the few companies to
provide LibreOffice business service in Chinese-language area.  One
of their products is the &quot;NDC ODF Application Tools&quot; â a
customized LibreOffice designed for users in Taiwanese government â
 provided by the NDC in Taiwan.  The <A HREF="https://en.cpc.com.tw/">CPC
Corporation, Taiwan</A>, a large (around 16,000 employees)
state-owned enterprise with 73 years history, is one of their
customers.  In the LibreOffice Asia Conference, Mr. Wen-ke Huang, an
employee in CPC who is responsible for the infrastructure information
systems and ODF adoption, <A HREF="https://conf.libreoffice.jp/slides/Wenke%20Huang_Grow%20out%20of%20nothing,%20the%20first%20successful%20experience%20about%20importing%20LibreOffice%20into%20state-owned%20company.pdf">shared
their experiences</A> and analyzed the reasons and methods to adopt
ODF and NDC ODF Application Tools.</SPAN></FONT></P>
<P CLASS="cjk"><FONT FACE="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><SPAN LANG="en-US">Different
from Microsoft's ecosystem, where companies in it are mainly selling
licenses and external expansion add-ons, FOSS allows anyone to
contribute code and even publish their own customized versions.  This
enables community members to participate into the core parts of
software development.  Besides, the grow demands for FOSS application
training and second-hand hardware also encourages community members
who expert in different fields to join the ecosystem.</SPAN></FONT></P>
<H2 CLASS="cjk"><FONT FACE="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><SPAN LANG="en-US">Commercial
Company That Is Loyal To The Community</SPAN></FONT></H2>
<P CLASS="cjk"><FONT FACE="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><SPAN LANG="en-US">Unlike
normal commercial software companies, FOSS-related companies would
keep thinking about their responsibilities as members of the
community while making a profit. Making money is one thing, but since
the community is the original motivation of the company's founding,
the two must cooperate with each other.</SPAN></FONT></P>
<P CLASS="cjk"><FONT FACE="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><SPAN LANG="en-US">The
first LibreOffice Asia Conference follows this thought.  &quot;I
asked Japanese community about hosting the first LibreOffice Asia
Conference, because I found that they have a very good and active
community and hence can go further more to find appropriate business
models,&quot; said Franklin.  &quot;When I attended LibreOffice Kaigi
or similar events in Japan and presented what we have done in Taiwan,
they always showed their envy and said that it was very difficult to
promote LibreOffice and ODF in Japan.  However I think that they're
doing very well; they just need to start thinking and finding more
business opportunities.  So the topic of the first LibreOffice Asia
Conference was set to business.  I hoped that after the discussion of
the business workshop and certification interview they can have more
confidence to start moving to business.&quot;</SPAN></FONT></P>
<P CLASS="cjk"><FONT FACE="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><SPAN LANG="en-US">&quot;Running
an FOSS-related company gives me not only the ability to contribute
without any worries in the community, but also to find business
opportunities for other community members from our experience, and to
use the operating principles to consolidate the FOSS ecosystem on the
ground,&quot; Franklin explained additionally.</SPAN></FONT></P>
<P CLASS="cjk"><FONT FACE="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><SPAN LANG="en-US">Although
in the LibreOffice ecosystem commercial companies can contribute to
the community while having profits, the relationship between the
company and community is not one-way assistance.  Sometimes it can be
tough if the relationship between the two is not good.  An obvious
example is the former OpenOffice.org community and Oracle.  A few
years before Oracle acquired Sun and hence the dominance of software
development of OpenOffice.org fell into Oracle's hand.  It was
dangerous because Oracle has never been friendly to FOSS, so some
core OpenOffice.org community members decided to fork LibreOffice and
found The Document Foundation.  &quot;That's why they chose
foundation as the form of the organization.  TDF emphasizes on the
independence of the organization very much due to the previous
troubles with Oracle,&quot; said Franklin.</SPAN></FONT></P>
<P CLASS="cjk"><FONT FACE="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><SPAN LANG="en-US">Italo
described the differences between the OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice
communities.  &quot;We reverted the paradigm,&quot; said Italo. 
&quot;This is OpenOffice, the company protects the project. So itâs
like when it rains, if you are under the umbrella you donât get
wet.  We reverted the umbrella (for LibreOffice), and this is the
concept of the mixing bowl...  We jump on a bowl and we have everyone
of us toward the same direction.&quot;</SPAN></FONT></P>
<P CLASS="cjk"><FONT FACE="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><SPAN LANG="en-US">The
independence of the community is not only reflected in the
organizational form.  Although the development work is mainly carried
out by commercial companies, TDF still dominates and makes decision
of the direction of the community and software development.  In order
to keep the independence and avoid conflicts of interests, the
statues of TDF stipulates that the composition of the Board of
Directors and Membership Committees must not have more than one-third
of the members belonging to a single company or organization. With
such a rigorous management, communities and companies can find the
right balance for each other.</SPAN></FONT></P>
<H2 CLASS="cjk"><FONT FACE="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><SPAN LANG="en-US">Ideals
And Business Can Cooperate Through Certification</SPAN></FONT></H2>
<P CLASS="cjk"><FONT FACE="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><SPAN LANG="en-US">At
the end of the LibreOffice Asia Conference, the LibreOffice
Certification Committee of The Document Foundation held a public
interview with several candidates from Taiwan and Japan community. 
As long as these candidates were approved by the committee, they
would become âLibreOffice Certified Professional Trainersâ, which
implies the expert skills and abilities to teach LibreOffice; or
become &quot;LibreOffice Certified Migration Professionals&quot;, to
assist organizations to adopt and migrate LibreOffice.</SPAN></FONT></P>
<P CLASS="cjk"><FONT FACE="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><SPAN LANG="en-US">For
TDF, the certified migration professionals and professional trainers
are an important way to promote the concept and develop business.  âI
invited the LibreOffice Certification Committee to attend this
conference and talk about business.  I hope to discuss with the
community about what can be done, what can be noticed when training,&quot;
said Franklin, who has been a certified migration professional and
professional trainer since 2016.</SPAN></FONT></P>
<P CLASS="cjk"><FONT FACE="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><SPAN LANG="en-US">Eric
Sun, a TDF member and a candidate in the certification interview this
time, has won unanimous approvals from the committee and became
certified migration professionals and professional trainers.  Eric
used to work in Open Source Software Application Consulting Center
(OSSACC), a project under SLAT, to promote FOSS and public domain
educational resources in schools.  He then co-worked with Franklin to
promote ODF/LibreOffice and has been the ace lecturer in Franklin's
team.  His getting certified by TDF can no doubt bring him more
credits and opportunities, both for business and for promoting FOSS.</SPAN></FONT></P>
<P CLASS="cjk"><FONT FACE="Liberation Sans, sans-serif"><SPAN LANG="en-US">LibreOffice
will be ten years old next year.  TDF was founded in the shadow of a
large commercial company at that time, but those members who set up
the foundation may not have expected that the seed of document
liberation and LibreOffice can be spread across the sea to the
distant Asia and root in  the ground, with a philosophy of equal
emphasis on ideals and profit.</SPAN></FONT></P>
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Attachments on bug 153839: 185591 | 185592 | 186006 | 186007