[HN Gopher] TDF ejects its core developers
___________________________________________________________________
TDF ejects its core developers
Author : janvdberg
Score : 149 points
Date : 2026-04-03 11:53 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (meeksfamily.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (meeksfamily.uk)
| pmontra wrote:
| TDF is https://www.documentfoundation.org
| dgellow wrote:
| Saving you all a click. "The Document Foundation", which seems
| to be the entity governing libreoffice?
| elric wrote:
| TDF apparently refers to The Document Foundation, the foundation
| behind things like LibreOffice.
| trelane wrote:
| Thread on the Collabora post he authored:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47599305
|
| TDF's response got posted but did not gain traction here (so
| far): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47609108
| vntok wrote:
| > The project welcomes contributions from true believers in
| open source. As the majority of people at Collabora are such
| believers, we expect them to continue contributing when the
| time comes.
|
| Kids, that's a perfect example of institutionalized passive-
| aggressive behavior.
| torginus wrote:
| So essentially 'we f**ked you over but we still expect you to
| do the work'?
| vntok wrote:
| For free!
| calibas wrote:
| Yeah, that seems like an odd thing to say.
|
| It's like they're setting themselves up for a "no true
| Scotsman" argument. Anybody who disagrees with their
| decisions isn't a "true believer" in open source.
| cge wrote:
| 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.
| cap11235 wrote:
| Fix the title. No one seems to recognize "TDF" (The Document
| Foundation) despite their daily dramatics, myself included.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Clearly it stands for the Tiscrete Dourier Fransform
| nicman23 wrote:
| Transform Daddy Fourier
| the_real_cher wrote:
| Talkin Dirty Floozies
| roenxi wrote:
| "The Document Foundation" for anyone too lazy to look it up.
|
| It has been a while since I've noticed a high-profile OSS
| schism; for anyone who isn't used to them, this is how
| communities behave. They're generally healthy as long as the
| stakes aren't too high. In a lighter moment, I might also call
| on TDF to expel any vim users too in the hope that they'll take
| the hint and switch to a more C-x aligned editor.
| salawat wrote:
| :tabnew<Enter>a Begone Emacs harlot! The user's of the one
| true universal editor will not be done away with so
| easily!<Esc>:wq!
| ike____________ wrote:
| Tour de France, obviously.
| janvdberg wrote:
| I tried changing it, but I guess when a post hits the fp this
| is not possible anymore (only by mods).
| Ertuit wrote:
| In France, TDF is a company that operates big TV and FM radio
| antennas, including on the Eiffel Tower and on many mountain-
| top.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Tours de France? ;)
|
| (Pun explainer: silent s, so it sounds like the cycling
| event. Meaning Towers of France - tour means both tower and
| tour[en] in French, only their grammatical gender is
| different)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's the "tyranny of structure"
| ike____________ wrote:
| Followed by Arrow's impossibility theorem, and we have our
| cycle
| khalic wrote:
| So, basically, TDF doesn't want Collabora (a company) people on
| their board. The technical vs non-technical framing seems
| contrived at best. The excuse by TDF seems... suspicious.
| zhongwei2049 wrote:
| Classic pattern. The board gets populated by people whose main
| skill is board politics, and they use governance tools to push
| out the people who actually build the thing. Seen this happen
| in multiple open source foundations.
| khalic wrote:
| This is anecdotal at best, but it does play into the tired
| old technical vs non-technical simplification. The fact that
| the two entities have now become direct competitors is a
| better explanation grounded in facts
| harvey9 wrote:
| I don't see it as trying to exclude non technical people,
| only that people who specialise in organisational politics
| will have a natural advantage over people who specialise in
| code so in the long run more of the former will sit on
| boards
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| Your explanation is also an oversimplification that leaves
| out a lot of key details.
|
| TDF is ran by a board. The board is supposed to contain 10
| people, it currently has 7. This board is expected to be
| elected by members on a regular schedule. The elections are
| late, because the rump board has twice delayed the
| elections. Instead of holding elections to fill out the
| board, the rump board chose to change the bylaws, through a
| legally questionable process (properly, they would have to
| hold a vote of trustees, but chose not to), to allow them
| to exclude people from voting in the elections. Then they
| use the new bylaws to exclude many of their political
| opponents, on very flimsy grounds0.
|
| You don't need to even consider which side of this conflict
| is technical or non-technical to see that there is
| something rotten here.
|
| 0: And yes, the grounds are very flimsy indeed. Excluding
| people in case of active litigation sounds sensible, until
| you consider that the litigation was started by the TDF
| board, and is frivolous. Collabra is using the trademarks
| under valid license.
| khalic wrote:
| Fair points, I didn't know about the legal tango from the
| TDF, circumventing processes to impose yourself is not
| the tool of the righteous usually
| bawolff wrote:
| On the other side of things, i've seen plenty of examples
| where technical people try to manage things despite having no
| administration experience and screw it up.
| mont_tag wrote:
| That sounds like what happened at Boeing.
| yuumei wrote:
| Wow that list of commits is brutal. Libre Office is dead. Just
| another corporate take over of an open source project.
| throwawee wrote:
| Can you really take over a project anybody can fork? Freedom is
| just a name change away.
| homebrewer wrote:
| I'm pretty sure most "normies" who are at all aware of what
| MS Office is, and what, if any, of its alternatives are,
| still use OpenOffice and think that it is _the_ no-cost
| office suite. LibreOffice already has problems with brand
| recognition, last thing we need is another fork.
| bee_rider wrote:
| LibreOffice is a pretty bad name, it is too clearly a spin-
| off of OpenOffice and never really gained its own identity.
| Being identifiable as a bad project's better fork is kind
| of a weak starting position.
| psychoslave wrote:
| That's pointing the underlying cultural issue. Taking the
| name for the thing it provided at some point, and consider
| it as unquestionable proxy to world view expected to be
| itself eternally static.
|
| Not only our representation of the world is wrong, but
| world evolves possibly faster than cognitive abilities can
| keep track of without the minimum effort which is driving
| out of comfort zone.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| That will just create another dead fork that no one works on.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| LibreOffice exists because the devs of OpenOffice forked
| it. If the project leadership now ejects the devs, I think
| that the new fork will be the living one.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Based on that table it looks like "LibreOffice the name"
| ejected "LibreOffice the software development project"
| basically. Although, it isn't really a corporate takeover,
| right? There was one company that was doing most of the work,
| now they've been ejected.
|
| So why not just fork it under a new name.
| fn-mote wrote:
| > So why not just fork it under a new name.
|
| Again? Sigh. Isn't that how we got LibreOffice in the first
| place? (From OpenOffice.)
| yomismoaqui wrote:
| Freeoffice as the next name? Seems like they are exhausting
| them quickly.
| mook wrote:
| I believe OpenOffice is so dead that the name is
| available again? That would be kind of hilarious, though
| probably untenable.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I don't think LibreOffice ever really took over the
| mindspace of OpenOffice anyway. Maybe they can a more
| distinct split will give it a more independent identity.
|
| Since Collabora already has an online version, maybe they
| should fork completely and call this offline version
| something that implies independence. So, I suggest:
| SolOffice. Haha.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > I don't think LibreOffice ever really took over the
| mindspace of OpenOffice anyway.
|
| It was really a terrible name if you're going after
| normie office workers. Nobody outside of open source
| people knows what "Libre" means or even how to pronounce
| it.
| alexgieg wrote:
| I checked the numbers. OpenOffice reports about 230,000
| downloads a week. LibreOffice, in contrast, reports about
| 1,000,000 downloads a week. Those are both direct
| downloads from their respective websites, thus not
| counting Linux distributions, in which the default office
| suite is LibreOffice. AFAIK, no distribution comes with
| OpenOffice as its default; it's always LibreOffice.
|
| I also checked Google Trends for the last 3 months,
| comparing LibreOffice vs OpenOffice. The first is
| searched on average 4.7 times more than the latter, which
| tracks with weekly download numbers.
|
| From those numbers, I'd say it's pretty clear the name
| "LibreOffice" won quite decisively over "OpenOffice".
| OpenOffice is still used a lot, but nowhere close to
| LibreOffice, especially when we add Linux distributions
| counts.
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| You have to ask yourself how does a dead project yield
| 230k downloads a week?
|
| OpenOffice is by far the better name and has a potential
| brand recognition that LibreOffice never will.
| tomstockmail wrote:
| They already have their version, it's called Collabora
| Online/Office.
| bakugo wrote:
| Why does an open source project, apparently developed by a
| handful of core developers, have a "board", a "membership
| committee", "elections" etc? And why do these include people who
| do not contribute directly to development at all?
|
| Let me guess, these same people also pushed to introduce a "code
| of conduct" to the project?
| tclancy wrote:
| Because to accomplish anything at scale you need organization.
| And organizing humans in anything other than forced labor
| involves respecting them, thus things like codes of conduct.
| These stories could be about anything and you gamergate
| veterans will show up grinding one of those axes. Care to throw
| in wild speculation about whether they use "master" as their
| main branch name, "slave" as backup database terminology or
| "allowlist". You know, any of those things that are keeping
| America from being great and winning the war.
| steve1977 wrote:
| > Because to accomplish anything at scale you need
| organization.
|
| I guess the question is does the size of the organization
| match the scale of what they want to accomplish?
| jaapz wrote:
| There are many open source projects out there that
| accomplished many things on an insane scale that are driven
| by single developers
|
| Or do you mean scale of organization?
| replooda wrote:
| OpenBSD, a rather more complex project, seems to be doing
| fine without a code of conduct -- in the sense bakugo
| employed "code of conduct," not in the generalized sensed you
| conflated it with in your non sequitur.
| toyg wrote:
| I mean, I like openbsd the product, but the community
| culture is notoriously terrible and unwelcoming to newbies.
| replooda wrote:
| I find it just the opposite. I can think of few
| communities nearly as patient or welcoming to anyone
| who's earnest and willing to put in the work to learn;
| true, there's no coddling or hand-holding, and, indeed,
| it tends to be very direct in calling out foolishness or
| laziness, and can reach epic proportions when it comes to
| dishonesty or entitlement, but nothing which can't be
| processed by emotional maturity, nor the gratuitous
| pedanticism-fueled browbeating often seen in some I-use-
| foo-btw open-source communities despite their shiny CoCs.
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| > I find it just the opposite. I can think of few
| communities nearly as patient or welcoming to anyone
| who's earnest and willing to put in the work to learn;
| true, there's no coddling or hand-holding, and, indeed,
| it tends to be very direct in calling out foolishness or
| laziness,
|
| That's nearly the exact opposite of welcoming newbies.
|
| To be perfectly honest, that's fine: OpenBSD demands a
| steep learning curve and that you know what you're doing.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| OpenBSD has a "netiquette" doc for its mailing lists:
| https://www.openbsd.org/mail.html
|
| Not sure if you want to count it as a "code of conduct",
| but it certainly defines rules on how to communicate and
| contribute to the project.
| replooda wrote:
| I'd count it as one in the general sense I'd count the
| style(9) manpage as another, not in the specific sense I
| indicated I was referring to:
|
| > ... fine without a code of conduct -- in the sense
| bakugo employed "code of conduct," not in the generalized
| sense ...
| psychoslave wrote:
| Organisation can take many form. Hierarchy and bureaucracy
| are two possible applicable categories in that domain.
| bakugo wrote:
| TIL open source projects simply didn't work before a certain
| (often big tech associated) crowd of non-contributors started
| forcing bureaucracy and codes of conduct down everyone's
| throats less than a decade ago.
| rmunn wrote:
| > Because to accomplish anything at scale you need
| organization. And organizing humans in anything other than
| forced labor involves respecting them, thus things like codes
| of conduct.
|
| This part of your comment was worthwhile. You should have
| stopped there, before starting to grind an unrelated
| political axe. Let's at least _try_ to follow the "Please
| don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It
| tramples curiosity." guideline, eh?
| mikkupikku wrote:
| From the article: _" These days some at TDF seem to emphasize
| equality instead."_
|
| I'm not sure exactly what is meant by that. My guess, having
| some experience with board-sitter parasites, is they're just
| appealing to empty principles to create the illusion of being
| important to the organization, because they're unable or
| unwilling to make more tangible and substantial contributions.
|
| When somebody can't justify their role with the quality of
| their work, they look for other justifications instead.
| Ideological justifications work best because they aren't
| provable and anybody who questions the value of the supposed
| ideological contributions can simply be dismissed as being
| ideologically opposed (see: the sibling comment accusing you of
| ideological alignment with gamergate, even though libreoffice
| has nothing to do with gaming.)
|
| For instance, suppose I am a useless parasite who decides to
| embed myself into the local school board; I have nothing of
| real value to contribute to such an organization, but maybe I
| want the role for the clout. Instead of doing something real, I
| could instead say that my role on the board is to advance the
| cause of equality. Anybody who says I'm useless can be
| construed as opposing equality. Anybody who tried to measure
| the actual equality in the org before and after my arrival can
| be dismissed because measuring equality is hard to do
| objectively.
|
| (I learned most of this from a few relatives of mine, who are
| such board-seeking parasites. By the way, parasite board
| sitters can use opposition to "woke" in the way they use
| championing the cause of equality; both cynical empty words
| used to distract people from the lack of real, substantial and
| demonstrable contributions. Anybody who complains can be
| accused of being woke. It works exactly the same regardless of
| what flavor of disguise the parasite chooses.)
| steve1977 wrote:
| These parasitic patterns are also visible in lower management
| levels, not only boards (not disputing your point, just
| adding to it).
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Yes absolutely.
| busterarm wrote:
| That line stuck out to me at first but it's clear from the
| context thus far:
|
| Up until the 2024 board election, the organization ran on
| meritocracy in the sense that those who contributed the most
| had the most say.
|
| Equality means here that the organization shifted to everyone
| present having an equal voice. It was no longer proportional
| to the work contributed.
| greenavocado wrote:
| tl;dr Germans and coordination while mitigating takeover risk
| (ironically)
|
| StarOffice was a German office suite bought by Sun Microsystems
| in 1999. Sun open-sourced it in 2000 as OpenOffice.org, which
| became the major free alternative to Microsoft Office through
| the 2000s. Sun kept significant control. They owned the
| trademark, required copyright assignment for contributions, and
| steered the project's direction. Many community contributors
| were uneasy with this arrangement but tolerated it because Sun
| was broadly seen as a good-faith actor.
|
| Oracle acquired Sun in 2010. Oracle had a reputation for being
| far more aggressive about monetizing and controlling its
| acquisitions (the Java/Google lawsuit being another example).
| The OpenOffice.org community had already been frustrated by
| years of slow decision-making and corporate gatekeeping, and
| Oracle's arrival made the situation feel untenable.
|
| A group of prominent community members and corporate
| contributors (including people from Red Hat, Novell/SUSE,
| Canonical, and Google) announced The Document Foundation in Sep
| 2010 and forked the codebase as LibreOffice. Oracle eventually
| donated the OpenOffice.org code to Apache but LibreOffice
| quickly became the version that mattered.
|
| The reason they had to fork was that a single entity (first
| Sun, then Oracle) had unchecked power over the project. The
| Document Foundation was explicitly designed to prevent that. If
| there's no formal structure, whoever controls the servers, the
| domain name, the trademark, or the build infrastructure
| effectively controls the project. A foundation with bylaws,
| elected leadership, and distributed authority makes it much
| harder for any single company or individual to take the project
| hostage.
|
| LibreOffice receives donations, employs some staff, holds
| trademarks, pays for infrastructure, and sponsors events. Under
| German law (TDF is registered in Berlin), you need a proper
| legal entity with accountable governance to do this. You can't
| just have "some developers" holding a bank account and a
| trademark informally. The foundation was officially
| incorporated on February 17, 2012.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| What are the plausible motivations for the TDF board members
| here? Do they pay themselves with org funds, or is it just a
| fight for turf and clout? I think identifying factors like this
| might be helpful, because if these factors could be eliminated or
| reduced it might save future orgs from infestations of the sort
| of people who seek out boards to sit on, as they'd find a better
| opportunity for parasitism in some other org.
| khalic wrote:
| They're relaunching Libre Office online apparently, they don't
| want competitors on their board I'm guessing
| chuckadams wrote:
| Possibly they don't want corporations on the board that are
| actively sandbagging an initiative that competes with that
| corporation's products. But much like the RubyGems fiasco,
| all the decisions seem very opaque, so I can't say whether
| that's actually the case.
| refulgentis wrote:
| While anything is possible, we can rest assured that if
| there was _any_ evidence of subterfuge / sandbagging,
| given our own involvement in the situation, they would have
| shared it at some point, surely in their main response.
| bokchoi wrote:
| From their blog:
| https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/04/01/comment-...
|
| > The Community Bylaws require that employees of companies
| involved in legal disputes with The Document Foundation be
| removed from TDF membership because, in the past, people made
| decisions in the interest of their employers rather than in the
| interest of The Document Foundation.
|
| and
|
| > The Document Foundation could have lost its charitable
| status, which would have had unforeseen consequences.
|
| I'm not sure why they would have lost charitable status, but
| that seems like a legitimate concern.
| c-c-c-c-c wrote:
| seems like a lot of drama in the open source document space, this
| seems unrelated to the OnlyOffice fork [1]. Interesting future
| ahead!
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47601168
| lstodd wrote:
| It's related in the sense that the EU push to free software
| office is what precipitated all this drama.
| duskdozer wrote:
| I might not be the target audience here but reading this I'm
| having trouble understanding what actually happened and why.
| sgbeal wrote:
| Please help me understand where the missing comma is supposed to
| be in:
|
| > their Membership Committee has decided to eject from membership
| all Collabora staff and partners over thirty people who ...
|
| Is it:
|
| 1) "eject from membership all Collabora staff and partners, over
| thirty people ..."
|
| 2) "eject from membership all Collabora staff and partners over
| thirty, people who ..."
|
| :-?
|
| Edit: that's from the article this post leads to:
| <https://www.collaboraonline.com/blog/tdf-ejects-its-core-dev...>
|
| (Downvoted for asking for legitimate clarification? Seriously?
| Age discrimination _is_ a real thing, so there's no way of
| knowing, for lack of a comma, which interpretation was intended.)
| elphinstone wrote:
| Has to be #1, as the blog makes no mention of age restrictions.
| Ejecting people for being over 30 would be unheard of outside
| of Logan's Run! (vintage scifi movie)
| kstrauser wrote:
| I read that as they're ejecting all but 30 people.
| sgbeal wrote:
| > I read that as they're ejecting all but 30 people.
|
| i had to re-read the original sentence several times to
| figure out how you came to that conclusion but can see it
| now: "all people over/above/beyond [a limit of] 30..."
| kstrauser wrote:
| It's really hard to parse and I'm just guessing at what it
| means. Now when I glance at it again, I read it like:
|
| > their Membership Committee has decided to eject from
| membership all Collabora staff and partners (over thirty
| people) who...
|
| I don't know if that's correct, either.
| chuckadams wrote:
| When it comes to a governing board that's interested in all the
| intimate details of an office software suite, I strongly
| suspect you're not going to find anyone _under_ 30.
| clcaev wrote:
| Why do these open source foundations (like Mozilla) have direct
| products anyway? Why not a certification? Who should the users be
| and why? Who are the collaborators and competitors? These are
| hard questions.
|
| At least with free software licenses we can separate the
| copyrights from the trademarks, and exercise the right to fork if
| a trademark owner is captured and misbehaves.
| phkahler wrote:
| How about a different take: This isn't really about two open
| source organizations fighting. It's a psyop from the powers that
| want to stop the digital sovereignty initiatives going on around
| the world by amplifying some friction that already existed.
| People won't want to use products with so much drama and
| uncertainty.
|
| TDF needs to eject the members who pulled the strings hardest on
| this - they are plants.
|
| Damn I didn't know I had that much of a tinfoil hat.
| mrks_hy wrote:
| Hah. Anyone with some tokens to burn can compose a report on
| the data?
| bawolff wrote:
| > People won't want to use products with so much drama and
| uncertainty.
|
| Really? You think the average user cares about this drama?
| Arainach wrote:
| Businesses and governments do, and they're both the target
| market and the drivers behind digital sovereignty efforts.
| toss1 wrote:
| I don't think GP is talking about average users; they seem to
| be talking about decision-makers in organizations, e.g., a
| town board that wants to achieve digital independence, but is
| made unsure by apparent turmoil in the governance in open
| source orgs...
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Really? You think the average user is a TDF user?
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| I'm confident the person who most wants to sabotage
| LibreOffice's success is Italo Vignoli. He's involved in this
| issue as well, but the other core problem is his marketing
| strategy:
| https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/author/italovignoli...
|
| Most of his blogs are about how awful OOXML (Microsoft Office's
| open standard) formats are, and that everyone needs to switch
| to ODF (his preferred open standard).
|
| What people don't want to use is products which don't work with
| everyone else's. LibreOffice works with Microsoft Office files
| really well, but for some reason Italo doesn't want you to know
| that. He wants the entire world to switch formats to
| LibreOffice's formats, but really that's just telling potential
| business users LibreOffice can't meet their needs...
| interacting with the existing monopoly of Microsoft Office
| users.
|
| This is a self-sabotaging marketing approach. LibreOffice needs
| to be promoting itself as an excellent drop-in replacement for
| Microsoft Office which will easily interoperate with every
| other organization's office applications, regardless of format.
| tapoxi wrote:
| He's using this approach because the EU requires documents to
| be in an open format, and by him advocating that OOXML is
| only open by name, he can advance a legal argument that
| OpenDocument is the only acceptable format.
|
| Office supports OpenDocument.l, it just doesn't use it by
| default.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| I understand his approach but it's a dumb approach. OOXML
| is plenty open, proven by the fact LibreOffice works with
| it fine. The push to force Europe switch to ODF only serves
| to suggest LibreOffice isn't capable of replacing Microsoft
| Office (in a world where most other organizations use
| Office). This is a conversation I have at work, where
| people laugh when LibreOffice is mentioned and suggest it's
| incompatible and we can't consider it.
|
| A far better marketing strategy would be to loudly
| announce, continually, that LibreOffice is the best
| software for handling Office files and ODF alike! And as
| people switch to LibreOffice and it defaults to ODF, that
| naturally grows.
|
| Meanwhile, LibreOffice's current marketing strategy may
| succeed in getting governments to offer ODF files and
| simultaneously sabotage anyone from ever switching to
| LibreOffice because LibreOffice's own marketing claims it
| won't work well with Word and Excel files.
| refulgentis wrote:
| > The push to force Europe switch to ODF only serves to
| suggest
|
| No, it doesn't only do that. It also suggests the open
| xml MS Office format is a mess.*
|
| > This is a conversation I have at work, where people
| laugh when LibreOffice is mentioned and suggest it's
| incompatible and we can't consider it.
|
| This is evidence your coworkers are misinformed and you
| can't correct them. It is not proof that the _only_ thing
| this blog post does is communicate LibreOffice can 't
| handle Microsoft Office docs.
|
| * this is a tale as old as time, I'm 37, remembering
| reading about this over and over again on /. when I was a
| young teen. It was part and parcel with Microsoft's
| antitrust era. The idea was the open format would help
| avoid antitrust claims, the complaint was the open format
| was so byzantine as to be effectively closed.
| homebrewer wrote:
| OOXML is a terrible format, significantly overcomplicated
| and implemented by MS Office in such a way as to make
| alternative implementations fully compatible with it
| impossible. It's "open" in the name only, burying it
| would be the only logical step if wide interoperability
| and using truly open formats is your real goal.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| And Italo's bad marketing strategy will only ensure OOXML
| wins. That's what you're missing, it's just a bad way to
| make the case or foster change.
| cge wrote:
| 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-...
| khalic wrote:
| Full circle indeed, nice historical capsule thanks
| ecshafer wrote:
| > There are many great ways to contribute to FLOSS projects and
| coding is only one of them - let me underline that.
|
| I've seen this a lot and really disagree. Maybe writing books or
| evangelism is useful, but those are still technical. These
| foundation boards and groups get filled up with people padding
| their career resume and make detrimental choices to oss. They
| want to get "Board member of X foundation" so they can try to get
| a corpo board seat.
| garciansmith wrote:
| There's more context in another HN thread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47602859
|
| As an outsider it's pretty opaque to me. I think the Document
| Foundation (handling LibreOffice) wanted to (re)release an online
| office suite that seems to compete with Collabora, which sells
| one. But the biggest contributors to LibreOffice are Collabora
| employees. I thought maybe they feared Collabora taking over the
| org, but it looks like there are formal legal disputes between
| the two, I think (see the post from the LibreOffice side
| https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/04/01/comment-...).
|
| And of course when legal issues are involved everyone is being
| very vague. I just hope it doesn't hurt LibreOffice's development
| too badly.
| dangus wrote:
| I have a feeling that the Open Document Foundation is going to
| end up being the loser here. Collabora is the entity that can
| fund development with a commercial offering. It sounds like
| they employ the core contributors to the project as well.
|
| Regardless of who "wins," I'm just here to say that I like
| OnlyOffice a lot better and switched away from LibreOffice. I
| like that it just looks more like a modern program and overall
| feels less clunky.
| karel-3d wrote:
| OnlyOffice is not really open source. They say they are but
| they also add impossible conditions to their license. (you
| are forced to use their logo, but you are also not allowed to
| use their logo.)
| dangus wrote:
| That doesn't bother me. I'm just looking for a free office
| program that runs offline and works well.
|
| It looks like the Euro Office suite will improve upon it
| when it launches and remove the remaining downsides to it.
| homebrewer wrote:
| Make sure to backup regularly. I don't know how good
| OnlyOffice is these days, but it definitely has (had?) a
| terrible history of quality control. We migrated off it a
| couple of years ago after losing several days of work due to
| severe (and, as it turned out, widely known) bugs in how it
| handled changes/document version tracking.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| On the one hand a foundation led by non-developers is bad.
|
| On the other hand, a foundation captured by a single company and
| prevented on working on anything that the company works on for
| profit is also bad.
|
| And finally, a 'personal blog' from someone who is actually
| senior at a company is a very weird back-hand submission. If the
| comments weren't defendable to put on the company blog, they
| probably aren't needed here either.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| Are the people responsible for the "LibreOffice Personal Edition"
| the ones ejected or the ones staying?
| eudamoniac wrote:
| Any word on why this happened? TFA just says it happened and was
| bad, with no even nominal explanation of why TDF did this.
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