...
>/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.
Ok, I skimmed these both links:
-https://www.collaboraonline.com/blog/tdf-ejects-its-core-developers/
-https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/04/01/comment-about-collabora-blog-post/
they provide some background info.
>/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?
Sorry, I didn’t mean that you preferred to quit these big companies,
since the same email signatures in patches over the years (at least for
most of you) showed you were quite attached to them.
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.
I completely agree that finding a business model that can sustainably
pay employees is not easy, especially in open source. Moreover, being
able to fully leverage one’s experience in a new job is indeed important.
>/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.
Yeah, as in most organizations there must be several ways of thinking,
and even internal conflicts within TDF that can lead to tensions with
external organizations (in this case, some companies) and I suppose TDF
made many mistakes, but for me the biggest one was not hiring most or
all of you. I mean, TDF knew not only your work but also your
personalities (e.g. through hackfests), so it wasn’t a risky decision to
hire each of you. Of course, one could argue it was due to a lack of
money, but perhaps some resources were wasted or spent too much in
certain areas—I don’t know. Still, I think TDF relied too much on
external companies for the codebase.
TDF has started hiring some developers at last, but I hope it’s not too
late.
Let's hope this conflict comes to an end.
Cheers
Julien
