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The Document Foundation ejects its core developers

collaboraonline.com

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Re: The Document Foundation ejects its core developers

#101

Post by psychoslave »

homebrewer wrote: post #77
throwawee wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you really take over a project anybody can fork? Freedom is just a name change away.

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.

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.

Re: The Document Foundation ejects its core developers

#102

Post by jaapz »

tclancy wrote: post #74
bakugo wrote: post #71

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?

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…

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?

Re: The Document Foundation ejects its core developers

#103

Post by replooda »

tclancy wrote: post #74
bakugo wrote: post #71

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?

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…

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.

Re: The Document Foundation ejects its core developers

#104

Post by refulgentis »

chuckadams wrote: post #85
khalic wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re relaunching Libre Office online apparently, they don’t want competitors on their board I’m guessing

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.

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.

Re: The Document Foundation ejects its core developers

#105

Post by lstodd »

c-c-c-c-c wrote: post #87

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

It's related in the sense that the EU push to free software office is what precipitated all this drama.

Re: The Document Foundation ejects its core developers

#106

Post by sgbeal »

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.)

Re: The Document Foundation ejects its core developers

#108

Post by psychoslave »

tclancy wrote: post #74
bakugo wrote: post #71

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?

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…

Organisation can take many form. Hierarchy and bureaucracy are two possible applicable categories in that domain.

Re: The Document Foundation ejects its core developers

#109

Post by busterarm »

mikkupikku wrote: post #75
bakugo wrote: post #71

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?

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 rol…

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.

Re: The Document Foundation ejects its core developers

#110

Post by greenavocado »

bakugo wrote: post #71

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?

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.

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