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 Taiwan’s cabinet received an official document from the National Development Council (NDC). "When exchanging digital documents between government agencies, the file format shall use Open Document Format (ODF) if transferred files are editable…… Do not use proprietary editors to directly save as ODF files…... It is highly recommended to use the NDC ODF Application Tools or LibreOffice to generate standard ODF files."
"This is the most exciting and cheering official documents in recent years!" 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 ".doc" or ".docx" format files, which people are quite familiar with. Instead, they are asked to use free and open source software – which permits people to download, research, improve and redistribute – 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.
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 "illegally allowed Microsoft's bid rigging". At the time, then Minister Ding-nan Chen replied that he would "wait for other software achieving a certain degree of universality and compatibility," and then the Ministry of Justice "would not rule out considering to adopt", 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 "ecosystem". 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?
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) – the legal charity entity behind LibreOffice – 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. "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."
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, "Our main assets are developers." 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 Collabora, CIB 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 Open Source Software Integral Institute (OSSII) in Taiwan is one of the few companies to provide LibreOffice business service in Chinese-language area. One of their products is the "NDC ODF Application Tools" – a customized LibreOffice designed for users in Taiwanese government – provided by the NDC in Taiwan. The CPC Corporation, Taiwan, 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, shared their experiences 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.
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. "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," said Franklin. "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."
"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," 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. "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," said Franklin.
Italo described the differences between the OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice communities. "We reverted the paradigm," said Italo. "This is OpenOffice, the company protects the project. So it’s like when it rains, if you are under the umbrella you don’t 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."
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.
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 “LibreOffice Certified Professional Trainers”, which implies the expert skills and abilities to teach LibreOffice; or become "LibreOffice Certified Migration Professionals", 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. “I 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," 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.