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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.
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.
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.
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.
Fix the title. No one seems to recognize "TDF" (The Document Foundation) despite their daily dramatics, myself included.
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…
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…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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
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.
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 did…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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 did…
> People won't want to use products with so much drama and uncertainty. Really? You think the average user cares about this drama?