Hi Michael and all,
On 30/11/2022 11:55, Michael Meeks wrote:
Hi there,
On 29/11/2022 23:38, Franklin Weng wrote:
> Believe me or not.
Let me try to provide a quick counter-balance in this thread.
It seems to me extraordinary to criticize Thorsten like this for
doing his job -
I have no doubt that Thorsten is very good at his job as a developer. I
surely don't have an adequate level of experience to criticise his
coding skills so I never put in doubt that he has been doing great
things for the advancement of LibreOffice as a volunteer and as a
contracted party through tendering.
In relation to his skills as a director and as a chairman for TDF I've
expressed my opinions in public in a very diplomatic way and concerning
only a small subset of the criticisms that IMHO he deserves which, for
the moment, I'm holding off hoping that he will improve his attitude and
help settling a number of issues.
We have a board director claiming in public that other directors
support his proposal,
That seems to me like a false statement.
I brought the proposal to a vote as that's the process that has been
agreed with Jan and the rest of the board:
https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/2022/msg00993.html
https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/2022/msg01088.html
https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/2022/msg01113.html
We elect a board to hammer out compromises
That's what we have done with the proposal for months.
All the versions of the proposal have been available for anyone to
comment on:
https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/zfoRygFbBgJZZcj
I pretended to have all of this done in public so that everyone could
see who was involved and how the proposal was being shaped.
- ideally these arrive well formed and in a way that commands support
or acquiescence of the whole board. In cases where that is impossible
then some split vote and ideally a principled objection E-mail, and
closing the topic seems wise.
In a normal board with a shared vision for TDF that would be quite easy
to achieve.
In TDF's board it seems clear that for years there have been also other
dynamics at play.
We don't elect a board to amplify division & to escalate even
uncontroversial topics (such as hiring two staff members) into some
apparent existential nightmare of posturing to try to 'win' at all
costs. It is good to decide topics and move on.
The decision was taken in regards to a process that has been brought
forward as agreed.
Jan resigned with peculiar motivations and doubled down on that with the
last email:
https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/2022/msg01100.html
Someone apparently told him that "Paolo claims that I have signed off
the latest version of the Developers proposal" and he was so upset about
it that he had to explicitly distance himself from the proposal he has
worked on for months.
He continues: "That is not true. That version is not balanced, and
Paolo’s unwillingness to find balance there was one of the main reasons
to my resignation."
I consider also that comment quite problematic as the various versions
of the proposal, the public and private comments clearly demonstrate
that Jan is wilfully posting false statements.
(As he's one of your contractors I would have thought that you would
have asked him to be careful with what he's posting on a public list as
it could have a negative impact also for your company reputation as a
contractor, very well known to all, posting false statements even with a
non corporate address still doesn't look good at all.)
I've actually tried to convince him not to include statements in the
proposal that would show Collabora Productivity as imposing limitations.
That would not look good for both organisations and on top of it anyone
with a minimum of experience on legal matters would have known that it
shouldn't have been added.
This was the sentence in question:
" TDF in-house developers will not compete with commercial contributors
and will not develop alternative implementations of Open Source projects
actively maintained by LibreOffice volunteer or corporate contributors –
like Collabora Online, mdds, or cppunit"
He tried to get the same "gist" with other formulations that made the
situation even worse and then when told we already agreed on the
solution months ago he resigned.
This is the sentence that easily fixes the issue:
"Eventual limitations related to tasks, areas, projects or bugs on which
the in-house developers should not work, eg. third parties are already
engaged with them, shall be regulated through separate agreements and
relevant communications between TDF and the third parties."
Someone surely wants to come up with "it's not just that is also
something else" but no, that's all we had left to discuss.
Then another director provided his point of view:
"*
