Let's put an end to the speculation - TDF Community Blog

Ideally, we would have preferred to avoid this post. However, the articles and comments published in response to Collabora’s and Michael Meeks’ biased posts compel us to provide this background information on the events that led to the current situation. Unfortunately, we have to start from the very beginning, but we’ll try to keep it brief. The launch of the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation was handled with great enthusiasm by the founding group. They were driven by a noble goal, but also by a bit of healthy recklessness. After all, it was impossible to imagine what would happen after September 28, 2010, the date of the announcement. At the time, nobody could imagine that the companies that had supported OpenOffice.org until then would create a project to kill LibreOffice. Also, if the project were to be successful, it would require resources greater than those available, and above all, a deep management experience. Fortunately, the project grew quite rapidly. However, the founders’ different backgrounds and opinions were at the same time the reason for some bold decisions – many of which right – as well as a few mistakes, which are the root cause of some of the current

TDF Community Blog

Meeks' blog post, for comparison:

https://www.collaboraonline.com/blog/tdf-ejects-its-core-dev...

Note the references to legal issues; draw your own conclusions.

> at the same time accusing others of historic conflicts of interest

Collabora clearly has a conflict of interest, as their Collabora Office products both benefit from, and compete with LibreOffice proper. They even allude to that conflict of interest in the next sentence:

> 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

A non-profit dedicated to promoting open source software should do what is best for that project and its users regardless of if doing so steps on the toes of corporate sponsors.

This plausibly demonstrates why a nonprofit may not be a great vehicle for some free software projects - while the nonprofit should do whats best for the project, if the main work is done by commercial sponsors then it’s crucial those sponsors feel the relationship is beneficial.

The reality is free software office apps require significant professional development input. Apache Open Office is the obvious example.

It’s a classic version of the tragedy of the commons. If Collabora goes off to its own thing, I struggle to believe they will maintain the development rate with new devs, and without development the TDF sponsorship will fall off.

I hope we are not looking back in two years time regretting this.

You're considering open source development as just another commercial endeavor. The fact that this is done by a nonprofit organization means it's pursuing goals that are not strictly commercial, and that is fine. Think about the GNU project as another example. If someone is not happy with that, it is always possible to start their own company.