The Foundation
The Foundation is a charitable Foundation under German law (gemeinnützige rechtsfähige Stiftung des bürgerlichen Rechts), which owns assets and conducts financial and legal transactions on behalf of the Community.
Manifesto
The manifesto is also available as a PDF from our website.
Our values
We commit ourselves:
to eliminate the digital divide in society by giving everyone access to office productivity tools free of charge, to enable them to participate as full citizens in the 21st century
to support the preservation of mother tongues by encouraging all peoples to translate, document, support, and promote our office productivity tools in their mother tongue
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:
the ownership of office productivity tools by monopoly suppliers, which imposes a de-facto tax on global electronic free speech and penalises the economically disadvantaged
the creeping domination of computer desktops by a single language, forcing people to learn a foreign language before they can express themselves electronically
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
Our way of working
Our core values lead us to believe in the following way of working:
- the home for our activities should be an independent self-governing democratic foundation
- membership of the foundation will be open to any individual who agrees with our core values and contributes to our activities
- we encourage corporate participation, e.g. by sponsoring individuals to work as equals alongside other contributors in the community