LibreOffice Drama: TDF Removes Collabora Developers in One Sweep
TDF's Membership Committee has removed all Collabora staff and partners from membership in one move, covering over 30 developers. This includes, per Collabora's own count, seven of LibreOffice's all-time top ten core committers.
To make things more complicated, this is only the latest in a series of departures. Several of TDF's original founders have already stopped being members over recent years, and of the remaining active founders, three of the last four are now paid TDF staff who aren't writing core code.
And it doesn't stop there. Collabora takes aim at a series of governance decisions it considers indefensible. Board appointments, it says, favored non-technical staff over experienced contributors, and the revival of shelved online code now puts TDF in direct competition with its own biggest contributor.
Then there are the legal proceedings against former volunteer board members, which were reportedly bankrolled by donor money, and trademark complaints directed at contributors while others are misusing the LibreOffice name freely without any pushback.
This comes from Michael Meeks, CEO of Collabora Productivity and one of the founders of The Document Foundation. He published this on April 1, and before you ask, no, it's not an April Fool's joke.
As for what Collabora plans to do next, Meeks has laid out plans for a new, lighter Collabora Office product, rebuilt from a cleaner base with less legacy code baggage and a web-based toolkit. Apart from that, their Classic product is not going away, with support set to continue for the foreseeable future.
On their future relationship with LibreOffice, Michael adds:
We will continue to make contributions to LibreOffice where that makes sense (if we are welcome to), but it clearly no longer makes much sense to continue investing heavily in building what remains of TDF’s community and product for them – while being excluded from its governance.
In this regard, we seem to be back where we were fifteen years ago. Meanwhile TDF continues to hire developers, sells LibreOffice and starts to act more like a staff-controlled collective than a Free Software project.
Collabora is also calling for developers to get involved in this new endeavor. If you have the relevant skills, you can head to their community page.
The response
The Document Foundation's official reply came from Italo Vignoli, a founder Collabora lists as having already exited TDF membership.
He has kept it short, confirming that the removals happened, pointing to TDF's recently adopted Community Bylaws as the basis. Those bylaws include a clause requiring anyone affiliated with a company in an active legal dispute with TDF to step down from membership.
The stated rationale is that past situations saw people put their employer's interests ahead of the foundation's, and the clause exists to stop that happening again. The specifics of the legal dispute between TDF and Collabora are not mentioned by either party.
On Collabora's plans and the wider fallout, the post keeps things brief, laying out that this kind of split is not unheard of in the world of FLOSS, and nothing in the MPL license stops Collabora from building whatever it wants.
TDF also makes clear that a membership revocation is not a ban from contributing, with the project remaining open to anyone, and expects Collabora to keep contributing "when the time comes."
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Source: It's FOSS