TDF/New-Era Manifesto
Proposal of a New-Era Manifesto
For the past ten years, the LibreOffice community has developed, supported and promoted the world’s leading open-source office productivity suite. We have attracted the support of tens of thousands of individuals and corporate bodies during this period.
We now call on all our supporters to follow us into the next phase of our development, as we move to make open source productivity tools both collaborative and distributed enabling individuals and groups all around the world to have agency, ownership and sovereign control over their documents.
We commit ourselves:
- To extend office productivity tools to enable secure and privacy-respecting collaborative editing of documents based on self-hosted technology that does not introduce dependencies on centralized services.
- To ensure to retain, grow, broaden and refresh skills, expertise and know-how about existing core functionality of office productivity tools in the body of currently active and future new contributors to enable their maintenance and further development for the global and many local communities around the world.
- To allow users of office productivity software to retain the intellectual property in the documents they create by use of open document formats and open standards.
- To an open and transparent peer-reviewed software development process where technical excellence is valued.
We reject:
- Limiting users of office productivity tools to be restricted to either refrain entirely from using collaborative editing or be at the mercy of a small oligopoly of SaaS providers who are using surveillance based business models and might ask arbitrary charges from users.
- Locking the skills, expertise and know-how about the development of office productivity tools in the workforce of a small set of big corporations.
- The ownership of file formats by proprietary software companies - documents belong to their creators, not software vendors.
- A closed software development process where errors can lie hidden and poor quality is accepted.
This manifest was collaboratively created by active members of the LibreOffice community in December 2023. It was originally published here: https://md.softwarefreedom.net/s/Nn1979BEZ# -- archive copy here: https://web.archive.org/web/20231210140002/https://md.softwarefreedom.net/s/Nn1979BEZ. As of December 2023, it is not an official commitment of the Document Foundation.