Michael Meeks
Let’s kick the developers out!
In an exciting episode of the ongoing saga of The Document Foundation (TDF), their Membership Committee has decided that in order to grow the community and accelerate its mission – it would be fitting to eject from membership all Collabora staff and partners. For TDF to eject so many, based on unproven legal concerns and guilt by association, with seven of the top ten core committers of all time (excluding release engineers) currently working for Collabora Productivity – brings a whole new meaning to meritocracy. This genius five-dimensional chess move is the culmination of TDF losing a large number of founders from membership over the last few years with: Thorsten Behrens, Jan ‘Kendy’ Holesovsky, Rene Engelhard, Caolan McNamara, Michael Meeks, Cor Nouws and Italo Vignoli no longer members. Of the remaining active founders, three of the last four are paid TDF staff (of whom none are programming on the core code). As well as those who created and shaped TDF initially this also impacts over thirty Collabora staff members, who have contributed faithfully to LibreOffice for many years.
Contriving a mess
In recent times several refreshingly non-conventional ‘strategic’ approaches have been pioneered: such as stacking the TDF board with non-technical, affiliated staff while at the same time accusing others of historic conflicts of interest; overriding past board and engineering steering committee decisions and violating their own processes to drag code out of the attic to enable competing with their largest single contributor. This last apparently with no clear technical plan beyond “to start a discussion”. Novel TDF schemes that we’ve tried to discourage have been: spending donors’ money to take legal action against blameless, volunteer, ex-board members for seemingly contrived reasons, or threatening those that contribute to the project for using the normally free to use LibreOffice trademark under license, while ignoring the widespread misuse of the mark by unlicensed non-contributors.
Another innovation has been a new tendering policy: voted through full of regression bugs and FIXMEs, or perhaps TDF incredibly not paying for tendered code under contracts that had been delivered (oh and meanwhile selling that in app-stores), or perhaps delaying and overturning elections after they are run, or dramatic changes to TDF’s bylaws by a rump-board. Or a different scheme – ejecting conference organizers Gabriel Massei and Gabor Kelemen for similarly nonsensical reasons, the latter in mid-organization of the annual conference – who nobly continued to deliver that. We could spend a week enumerating the contributions of those unfairly removed, how about Andras Timar who was responsible for creating our translation infrastructure, but let’s not get too deeply into this deep well of tangled incoherence; so where is the good news
April Fool !?
If you got here, and thought “this is the most outrageously implausible set of circumstances, it can’t be true” – well done, this is indeed April the 1st … but sadly this is really is a summary of where we are now at; a double april fool as it were.
Sense & sensibility
Our team at Collabora is dedicated to making Open Source Rock: restoring Digital Sovereignty to our users. Many of us helped to create LibreOffice before TDF even existed, and we plan to continue our mission. If for now we can climb out of this pit of directionless political grievance – that is a relief, and we have a clear plan. If, like us, you too love to work on making great Free Software / Open Source (FOSS), and like a sensible place to do it please do come work with us on what is still by far the best FOSS Office code-base in the world – with a bright future ahead of it.
We are of course really grateful to an amazing legacy of code from StarDivision, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, SUSE, RedHat and so many others who have contributed in the wider community and to our many photogenic supporters for their support. We are also deeply grateful to our partners and customers for funding everything we do.
Outside of the TDF ‘strategy’ bubble – I would also like to acknowledge all the good and decent TDF staff with real experience of FLOSS projects that we have collaborated with around the code for many years very happily to do amazing things: we respect your service, competence and commitment.
What’s next ?
We have bold and ongoing plans to create an entirely new, cut-down, differentiated Collabora Office for users that is smoother, more user friendly, and less feature dense than our Classic product (which will continue to be supported for years for our partners). This gives a chance to innovate faster in a separate place on a smaller, more focused code-base with fewer build configurations, much less legacy, no Java, no database, web-based toolkit and more. We are excited to get executing on that.
To make this process easier, and to put to bed complaints about having our distro branches in TDF gerrit, and to move to self-hosted FOSS tooling we are launching our own gerrit to host our existing branch of core, more details on how git works here. To get involved this will mean creating a new account on the system and a few hours of disruption while our CI systems are moved over. 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.
For our Customers and Partners
By choosing an Open Source solution, your Digital Sovereignty is protected, and by getting support from a responsible enterprise you can be sure that you have support today. Collabora is committed to supporting its products for the long term, often three years from their release, and stands behind them in many ways. When we launched the new Collabora Office we made clear that we plan to keep supporting our Classic product for the forseeable future too.
For fun & friendly developers
If you would like to get involved with something exciting and new, to develop in good company, in a community with a low tolerance for talkers-not-doers – please do join us and get involved and chat on matrix. We have weekly face to face meetings, tea-time trainings on aspects of the code, and of course we would love to see you in-person at our conference in Hamburg next month: COOL Days for talks, team building, and much more. Meanwhile, why not try out an easy hack.
Postscript: some readers still really struggle to believe this is accurate, it seems like a bad joke; but in fact we really were just ejected, so we really go do something better.
