Hi Julien, all,

Julien Nabet wrote:
> On 08/05/2026 10:17, Michael Meeks wrote:
> >     Also - we have no plans to change the license. While today TDF is
> > behaving aggressively, it may be more reasonable in the future - there
> > is always hope of future collaboration.
> 
> So Collabora decided to release a desktop version in 2025, it's ok but when
> TDF decides to re start LOOL in 2026, it's "aggressive"?
> 
That is a misunderstanding. This aggressive move, that I believe the
blog post is referring to, is the kicking out of all Collabora (and
affiliated) TDF members.

> I know I don't know all the legal stuff about the conflict but when
> I saw year after years that people who worked on Gnome, Red Hat,
> Suse, Novell, etc were going to Allotropia and above all Collabora
> then Collabora who buys Allotropia, I expected some problem.
>
You are aware, that all of Red Hat, Suse, Novell, Canonical, IBM,
Oracle & others shut down their Open/LibreOffice development teams?

So people getting hired by the companies to continue LibreOffice
development, trying to create business models around the code base
where larger companies seemed to have failed - in my world was a good
thing. It was in fact solving the problem of continued professional
core development, and keeping many decades of experience alive for the
project.

> When there are several companies, we may consider this influence as
> diluted but when one company has hired almost all historical devs, I
> can understand it can be considered as a danger.
>
I can tell you, that certain people at TDF have always considered the
ecosystem a threat - and treated it as one bloc, even invented
creative ways to lump independent companies together.

And one of the reasons for the allotropia merger last year clearly was
the increasingly hostile stance of TDF towards us. Having my team
kicked out, and perhaps further escalations like removing commit
rights, would have posed a significant business risk to the company.

Like for other things in life: under threats and aggression, victims
tend to close ranks, and work together.

So if TDF wanted to encourage & nurture a diverse ecosystem of
companies, then pretty much nothing in the past 5 years signalled that
intention. Quite the contrary.

Cheers,

-- Thorsten

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