Jan Wildeboer 😷
Some folks at Microsoft and Google (and maybe even the new EuroOffice people) are very happy about all the infighting in the LibreOffice/TDF/Collabora community, I guess. Le sigh.
GRASSY KNOWLESNow I have my own (long) history with the document foundation and I am 100% sure that they are on the right side. But based on the info I have, they felt like they were forced to do what they did. This whole escalation comes at the worst possible time. But nothing I can do. In my personal opinion, the Open Document Format and its ecosystem is THE chance for #DigitalSovereignty, not only for Europe.
John Ulrik@jwildeboer I wish they stopped the infighting. They‘re not enemies. Last time I checked there was this … other office suite, 3-something or so, currently being enslopified … if you have energy to fight, fight that!
Bjoern Michaelsen@jwildeboer
The original sin was the public perception that TDF was controlling the development of #LibreOffice. It never was and as a German NGO mostly cannot even do that in the way its users expect. The deadly follow up mistake was trying to directly hire devs: it doesnt scale and the foundation has no competent leadership to direct them anyway.
Instead TDF should have invested in diversifing LibreOffice dev contributor base with volunteers or other parties to replace the diversity once SuSE/RedHat/Canonical disinvested and the core devs were more and more monopolized. It failed to do so out of foolish anti "developer" sentiment.
@Sweetshark That's your opinion that I absolutely respect. It's not my opinion, though. It's destructive infighting, fuelled not just by one side. There is also a lot of ego involved and this escalation was ultimately unavoidable, mostly due to that. That's my opinion, that I hope you also respect.
@jwildeboer
I agree - also on the point that there is ego and ... difficult personalities on both sides. But there is also a structual issue beyond the egos that goes back longer than LibreOffice itself: the problematic understanding of #opensource as "free as in beer" and of LibreOffice as a product and not as a project/community. The latter would have broken this at some point even without toxic personalities.
I agree - also on the point that there is ego and ... difficult personalities on both sides. But there is also a structual issue beyond the egos that goes back longer than LibreOffice itself: the problematic understanding of #opensource as "free as in beer" and of LibreOffice as a product and not as a project/community. The latter would have broken this at some point even without toxic personalities.
@Sweetshark I always cared more about the ODF as a standard and less about the implementations. ODF being implemented in many places and in interoperable ways is what I always hoped for. And that can and should still be done.