Rename to Yolo Office / Totally-Not-Collabora-Online / ???

[alexAubin]

Follow-up of the discussion with the folks from LibreOffice Online and Collabora Online which is summarized here : https://forum.yunohost.org/t/nombre-dutilisateurs-limite-et-risques-de-securite/7722/11?u=aleks

TL;DR :

• LibreOffice Online / Collabora Office have to build a business model to be able to pay developers, which is fine
• To do this, they use a trademark and sell supports, which is fine
• But contrarily to other projects like Nextcloud, they are not welcoming to other FOSS projects trying to package their app just so that people can actually install and use it easily
• The way they communicate about both the trademark and their actual business model feels opaque
• ... which includes their weird artificial limitation about X documents opened

Basically, to avoid any issue, we are rename the package so that it's not confused with LibreOffice / Collabora. This is kinda reminiscent of the whole Debian / Firefox / Iceweasel fiasco. The damn software has feathers and does "quack" and it comes from Duck Inc., but you can't say it's a duck because of legal yolomacnuggets bullshit, even tho you are not trying to make profit and even though the damn FOSS freedoms should allow you to.

I believe we should find a way to use this to highlight of this trademark bullshit conflicts with the idea of FOSS and its supposed freedoms, especially when it's about a FOSS project (Yunohost) just trying to make it easy for people to be able to use another FOSS project (LibreOffice / Collabora).

So here are a few ideas for renaming this repo :

• Yolo Office (Online?) (this should make people wonder what this repo is about / why it's called this way, and we can have a small pitch explaining the whole trademark thing)
• YOLO Suite (as "Your Online Libre Office Suite") (same as previous)
• Trademark Sucks Office (Online?)
• Totally Not Collabora Online (well I guess from a legal perspective that doesn't work)
• Totally Not Libre Office Online (same as previous)
• <Insert your own trademark> Office (here we could imagine having an option in the manifest so that you can set your very own brand name, using Collabora's rebranding mechanism)
• Libertarian Office 🤔

Or more serious / conventional ones :

• Your Office (Online?)
• Freedom Office (Online?)
• Common Office (Online?)
• Shared Office (Online?)
• Community Office (Online?)
• Together Office (Online?)

[tituspijean]

DebrandedOnlineOfficeSuite, or DOOS.

[lapineige]

(you forgot OpenOffice Online )

So LibreOffice Online is also not an option ?

My point here would be that we should avoid to confuse users as much as possible (this package is already hard enough to get working ^^). People would search for Collabora Online to be available in Yunohost with their Nextcloud, not "some random package name".
I get the point of the joke and political message, but the priority is usability for users.

Can't we reference, at least here in the repo (and maybe in a message shown during installation) that this is based on Collabora Online (and maybe that it's unofficial and we can't use that brand name ?) ?
If we can't, we'll loose a lot of clarity…

(LOOnline ? Collaboration Online ? Online Collaboration ? :D)

Note: does the repo and package name in the manifest needs to be changed too ?
That would be a mess to migrate everyone and explain that "this random name" is actually Collabora.

[alexAubin]

Well yea I do agree with you : from the UX perspective, people will search either Libre Office Online or Collabora Online, and not some random weird name. Which is why I'm so pissed off about this kind of bullshit just like it was with Firefox and Debian.

I don't know precisely what's the policy for using the Collabora brand and using the Libre Office brand ... I'm pretty sure a big "no go" for both of them is if we remove their artificial limitation about X document opened. Imho it's stupid not to remove it, because people will eventually ask how to remove it, and we are going to explain them on the forum, and then why not include the trick directly in the package ...

Anyway even though I was totally yourside of "let's just find a way to call it either Collabora or LibreOffice because this is what users will be looking for" (and after all, it's Collabora / LibreOffice's software, so I don't even get why they don't want the credit for it ~.~), we've spent so much time on this bullshit with @zamentur that at this point I just want to see things moving forward that I find changing the name acceptable as long as we can solve this once and for all ...

LOOnline ?

Aha yeah maybe we can find a trick to get to "LOL Online" or something 👍

Also on the chat, was thinking about "YOLO Suite" as "Your Online Libre Office Suite"

Edit :

ah to answer your question about :

Note: does the repo and package name in the manifest needs to be changed too ?

I don't know, I suppose yes. My naive interpretation is that, from a legal perspective, the branding we're using refers to everything we display to the user, so that include the name we put in our app catalog ...? And that also includes the ID of the app which is sometimes displayed in the interfaces ...

[lapineige]

What if we don't include the setting but explain here how to do it ? 😅

You said you spent a bunch of time on this: did they contact you or the Yunohost team ?
I was not aware of that.

so that include the name we put in our app catalog ...?

Do we actually show that to the users ? Isn't it only the admins ?

[alexAubin]

What if we don't include the setting but explain here how to do it ? 😅

Well that's not the spirit of YunoHost ... An app should be working out of the box with all the features and you shouldn't have to tweak it manually, otherwise that defeats the point.

You said you spent a bunch of time on this: did they contact you or the Yunohost team ?
I was not aware of that.

We kind of both contacted each other at the same time because we wanted to clarify the situation and the Libre Office / The Document Foundation folks were enthusiasts about a yunohost package (though the Collabora folks apparently, "less enthusiast" ...?) (this whole thing about TDF vs. Collabora does not make things easier to understand >.> )

Anyway we also spent dozens of hours talking about this with @zamentur trying to understand what to do and why that whole situation arises in the first place compared to - again - many other softwares where this does not happen even though there's a trademark as well, c.f. Nextcloud.

Do we actually show that to the users ? Isn't it only the admins ?

Ah yeah there's this ambiguity ... well in that case I think what matters is the admin, but I'm not 100% sure. Basically my understanding is that they're afraid that if the software doesn't work as well as it could because of the hardware and the way it was deployed, it "hurts the brand" and/or people will ask them for free support and they don't have manpower to handle this. Which is, again in my understanding, just a clumsy way to say "we need to pay devs, so we add artificial technical and legal limitations and langue de bois and other misleading explanations so that you will just let us handle the install and maintenance in exchange of money". In the meantime, c.f. the thread on the forum, people just think Libre Office Online / Collabora Online is more "libre" whereas to me, it's quite debatable wether or not this is FOSS in the first place.

(anyway sorry this is just an endless rant because I'm so pissed off by this shit. I do understand that they need a business model, but their model is fucking opaque and in practice kills freedom 0, yet in the meantime the decentralized internet community needs proper alternatives to the Google Suite)

[lapineige]

Well that's not the spirit of YunoHost ... An app should be working out of the box with all the features and you shouldn't have to tweak it manually, otherwise that defeats the point.

I know that's not a good thing.
On the other end, people that would need to remove the limits could be using a quite big server, with a bunch of people ? Then I suppose they would have some technical admin user that could do it ?

I'm wondering which case is the worst : have a different (and confusing) name, or no integrated setting to remove the limit (with a good tutorial, but that means no GUI way to do it).

Indeed this is quite unclear and a bit strange, yet such alternatives are precious, and our first goal is to provide better tools for everyone, in the easier way possible…
(and I do understand they needs, while I think it's a strange way to try to guarantee it… we could just say that's an unofficial support, with no warranty, not related to their organisation).

[Thatoo]

I'm sad to read this stupid trading problem...

What about Collaboffice ?

[alexAubin]

As a side note, made a stupid poll on the internetz, mostly for the fun xD

https://cybre.space/@aleks/103985565422468405

[pagiraud]

Hi, I'm totally outside of Yunohost for now (waiting for the stable 4.0 version to install and try it on my Raspberry Pi 4) but I read this issue and I tried to find a name (because yes, this is losing precious time on pure bullshit) that fit as much as possible all your criteria.
So I come up with Coopera Online. I think the semantic proximity with Collabora might give the sense that both software are close functionality wise (so that someone browsing the Yunohost catalog think it may be an online office suite) while suggesting some kind of rebranding and so raising awareness of the trademark issue (which could be mentioned somewhere in the app).
Best regards

[wget]

None of the above. Just use the name CODE acronym for Collabora Online Development Edition. Done.

This is what is happening with Nextcloud and the Nextloud Hub release. CODE is in the Nextcloud app store.

Collabora Online can be installed in 3 way on Nextcloud:

• Dedicated Collabora Online server
• Dedicated CODE server
• Built-in CODE server

Despite what TDF could write on their "marketing plan", LibreOffice Online is just a bucket of code used for posterity. Collabora wrote 96% of that code.

CODE targets developers and SOHO, so this is a perfect use for Yunohost. =)

ARM is not offered right now because still no client has asked for this yet :/ Which is unfortunate :( Crowdfunding could help?