Something that is dismaying to me about this situation is that, on one hand, the anti-Collabora arguments are not unconvincing: the situation with Collabora and the foundation seems to have been dubious at best, and I would not be surprised if their legal worries are well-founded.

But on the other, in arguably trying to address the problems, the anti-Collabora side seems to exhibit a distressing lack of honor and decency. The dismissal of voting results that didn't go their way, the malicious misreadings of member votes against their proposals (eg, deciding "If the Board majority group insists on proceeding with this misguided and premature motion, I vote NO" was not a vote against the proposal because the motion was "neither misguided nor premature"), the arguments that complaints about their behavior violate community standards and are are not sufficiently respectful of the work they do, the toxic, patronizing, dismissive statements toward developers and others... even if they are right, I do not understand why they need to behave the way they are behaving.

It's strange. I started reading about this expecting that I'd support TDF's position against a company with a somewhat dubious open-non-open split, with a reasonable claim about conflict of interest, but the behavior of the TDF side seems sufficiently toxic that it's difficult to support them.

In similar behavior, one of the votes against the community bylaws that seem to have resulted resulted in the expulsions was "If the Board majority group insists on proceeding with this misguided and premature motion, I vote NO". Those in favor decided that the vote was conditional and not valid, because "this motion is neither misguided nor premature". They then proceeded to tell others complaining about the decision that they were violating community standards in doing so.

As far as I can tell, the invalidated vote made no difference to the outcome; it is difficult for me see a legitimate motivation for the interpretation of the vote.

I do not know enough about this particular drama to have any opinion on the merits of the sides involved. However, I cannot help but notice the parallels with the infancy of TDF and the separation of LibreOffice from OpenOffice.org. In 2010, Oracle demanded the resignation of every TDF member from the OOo Community Council that was nominally its governance board; this constituted the removal of every community member (ie, non Oracle employee) from the council [1]; I don't know the full details of what happened after the meeting [2], but it seems like the TDF members refused to resign and that they were removed. The justification was quite similar to the justification here [3]: that the TDF members had a conflict of interest by virtue of being TDF members, and that they could continue to be involved if they left TDF.

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/10/oracle-want...
[2]: https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Community_Council_Log_20101...
[3]: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/04/01/comment-...