The Document Foundation Removes Dozens of Collabora Developers (itsfoss.com) 7
Long-time GNOME/OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice contributor
Michael Meeks is now general manager of Collabora Productivity. And earlier this month he complained when LibreOffice decided to bring back its LibreOffice Online project, as reported by Neowin, which had been inactive since 2022. After the original project went dormant — to which Collabora was a major contributor — they forked the code and created their own product, Collabora Online.
But this week Meeks blogged about even more changes, writing that the Document Foundation (the nonprofit behind LibreOffice) "has decided to eject from membership all Collabora staff and partners. That includes over thirty people who have contributed faithfully to LibreOffice for many years." Meeks argues the ejections were "based on unproven legal concerns and guilt by association." This includes seven of the top ten core committers of all time (excluding release engineers) currently working for Collabora Productivity. The 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).
The blog It's FOSS calls it "LibreOffice Drama." They've confirmed the removals happened, also noting recently adopted Community Bylaws requiring members to step down if they're affiliated with a company in an active legal dispute with the Foundation. But The Documentation Foundation "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.'"
Collabora's Meeks adds in his blog post that there's "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 [for code review], and to move to self-hosted FOSS tooling we are launching our own gerrit to host our existing branch of core... 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.
But this week Meeks blogged about even more changes, writing that the Document Foundation (the nonprofit behind LibreOffice) "has decided to eject from membership all Collabora staff and partners. That includes over thirty people who have contributed faithfully to LibreOffice for many years." Meeks argues the ejections were "based on unproven legal concerns and guilt by association." This includes seven of the top ten core committers of all time (excluding release engineers) currently working for Collabora Productivity. The 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).
The blog It's FOSS calls it "LibreOffice Drama." They've confirmed the removals happened, also noting recently adopted Community Bylaws requiring members to step down if they're affiliated with a company in an active legal dispute with the Foundation. But The Documentation Foundation "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.'"
Collabora's Meeks adds in his blog post that there's "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 [for code review], and to move to self-hosted FOSS tooling we are launching our own gerrit to host our existing branch of core... 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.
Big egos (Score:4, Insightful)
Do not make for good engineering. FOSS is no different.
Re: (Score:1)
petty infighting (Score:2)
This is typical. The Collabra people annoyed the TDF people because they were clearly smarter and more productive.
Collabora Office Desktop status (Score:2)
Unusable for longer documents made under LibreOffice Writer. The documents stutter during editing, have minor rendering issues,
The UI is clearly better than LibreOffice's. It's still bad (Ribbon elements, especially style previews, are not scaled to provide a consistent experience), but at least they are doing something about UX.
Verdict: Commendable effort, still a long way to go before being ready for public consumption.
FU, but keep working for free! (Score:2)
But The Documentation Foundation "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.'"
this part from TFS makes rivals pointy hair boss productivity logic.
Oh, you're a founder and long time major contributor to this group? Well, we'll strip you of membership and thus voting and any say in decision making, but we'll condescend to allow you to keep fixing bugs and putting up MRs to make our product better....
What?! why are you upset? i'm doing you a favor by letting you continue to do unpaid work for me!
Re: (Score:2)
Except that it wouldn't be unpaid work for TDF. LibreOffice code is part of Collabora's product, so they'd be contributing code to their own software.
Now they could choose to fork the code, but then they're taking on a bunch of project infrastructure and maintenance themselves. Plus the two projects could still grab code from one another since they'd still be under the same licenses. They can't really take their ball and go home since the ball is open source.
Sometimes it is cheaper for groups to collaborate
Sabotage? (Score:2)
Follow the money.
This stinks of sabotage inflicted by unethically motivated actors.
Presuming they're not just incredible fools, which we ought not assume.