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Comment by buovjaga | Hacker News Reader

That is not the practice anymore. The assessment was found to be incorrect.

There are now two people focusing mainly on C++ development:

https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2023/05/30/welcome-...

https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2023/07/04/welcome-...

However, out of 16 The Document Foundation employees/contractors, I count 9 (including myself, Ilmari Lauhakangas) who do at least some LibreOffice development or 11, if you count development outside of LibreOffice source itself. So donations have always paid for development as well.

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cool. that is, as i said, from the discussion from last year i think.

i regularly submit bug reports and have something like 20-25 open issues that i have submitted.

its nice that 11 people are doing dev work but don't you think we should be doing more? wouldn't it be possible to get a grant from wikimedia for doing dev work directly under foundation rather than from collabora et al? wikimedia certainly has the money to bankroll LO.

that said, 11 people are not a lot considering the scope of the project.

why doesn't the foundation use cheap labour from other countries? you can certainly have 5 FTE at the cost of a single american/german one? india for example. There is a lot of indian/indonesian communties. these volunteers would love to be paid to fix things.

why don't you explore that ?

The foundation was set up to foster an ecosystem of commercial companies (or in-house teams in public sector entities) and that is the emphasis that the directors of the foundation have maintained since 2010. While I agree with you that there is space for the foundation to do more in-house without stepping on the toes of the ecosystem companies, it was not a walk in the park to get approval for the hiring of two C++-focused devs.

LibreOffice contributors can influence how the foundation operates by becoming members of the foundation and voting in director elections or becoming elected into the board of directors.

I am mentoring over 120 new volunteer contributors per year (most into C++ development or quality assurance). I'm really happy with the workflow I've constructed and you can read more about it here: https://discourse.sustainoss.org/t/how-i-recruit-and-mentor-...

As TDF is a non-profit, cost of labour is certainly an important factor when hiring.

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