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The Document Foundation ejects its core developers

collaboraonline.com

171–180 of 184 posts

Re: The Document Foundation ejects its core developers

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find it just the opposite. I can think of few communities nearly as patient or welcoming to anyone who's earnest and willing to put in the work to learn; true, there's no coddling or hand-holding, and, indeed, it tends to be very direct in calling out foolishness or laziness, That’s nearly the exact opposite of welcoming newbies. To be perfectly honest, that’s fine: OpenBSD demands a steep learning curve and that…

What is? No coddling? Little tolerance toward laziness? Zero toward entitlement? That's closer to the opposite of being patronizing, I would say. They point to documentation in response to the kind of request I've seen closed with RTFMs elsewhere. They'll expect one to read it, and try one's hand at whatever one is trying to accomplish — and they'll feel slighted by a refusal, given how much work they put into it. An…

What do you consider laziness?

Why do you believe pointing to the manual is newbie friendly?

In the Linux world, it took ages before it was newbie friendly (thinking Ubuntu and Mint).

OpenBSD serves an important niche, but to brand it as newbie-friendly does OpenBSD a disservice.

Or perhaps you mean newbie tolerant?

Re: The Document Foundation ejects its core developers

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is? No coddling? Little tolerance toward laziness? Zero toward entitlement? That's closer to the opposite of being patronizing, I would say. They point to documentation in response to the kind of request I've seen closed with RTFMs elsewhere. They'll expect one to read it, and try one's hand at whatever one is trying to accomplish — and they'll feel slighted by a refusal, given how much work they put into it. An…

What do you consider laziness? Why do you believe pointing to the manual is newbie friendly? In the Linux world, it took ages before it was newbie friendly (thinking Ubuntu and Mint). OpenBSD serves an important niche, but to brand it as newbie-friendly does OpenBSD a disservice. Or perhaps you mean newbie tolerant?

> What do you consider laziness?

In this context, what I expanded above as foisting onto others the responsibility for the effort required by what we want to accomplish.

> Why do you believe pointing to the manual is newbie friendly?

To the documentation, which may or may not be a manpage; as it's usually done in response to a request for the information contained therein, I do find it reasonable.

> OpenBSD serves an important niche, but to brand it as newbie-friendly does OpenBSD a disservice.

We're discussing OpenBSD's community, not the system itself.

> Or perhaps you mean newbie tolerant?

I meant what I wrote, that I find the community to be the opposite of "notoriously terrible and unwelcoming to newbies," by which I do not imply newbie-friendliness in a kindergarten sense.

Re: The Document Foundation ejects its core developers

#173

Fix the title. No one seems to recognize "TDF" (The Document Foundation) despite their daily dramatics, myself included.

I tried changing it, but I guess when a post hits the fp this is not possible anymore (only by mods).

It's not affected by hitting the FP but the edit window is 2 hours. I've edited it now. Sorry I didn't see this earlier!

Re: The Document Foundation ejects its core developers

#174

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…

(Thanks - we'll merge the threads)

Re: The Document Foundation ejects its core developers

#175
post #135
post #66

> The project welcomes contributions from true believers in open source. As the majority of people at Collabora are such believers, we expect them to continue contributing when the time comes. Kids, that's a perfect example of institutionalized passive-aggressive behavior.

It's strange. I started reading about this expecting that I'd support TDF's position against a company with a somewhat dubious open-non-open split, with a reasonable claim about conflict of interest, but the behavior of the TDF side seems sufficiently toxic that it's difficult to support them. In similar behavior, one of the votes against the community bylaws that seem to have resulted resulted in the expulsions was…

Yeah, it's clear from reading things that there's a lot of personal animosity around all of this, and Italo Vignoli's resignation[1] makes it clear that everyone has mud all over themselves. But that said, it's almost impossible to read that voting exchange[2] as anything other than a deliberate and petty steamrolling of dissent by the current majority. Even being extremely charitable and supposing that the fact that not everyone is native to the english language, it seems impossible to reconcile the decision to not count this vote or record the dissenting comments because it was "unclear" with the supplied evidence that they recorded a similar dissenting "conditional" vote just weeks prior.

Follow on that with the removals from the members list (which as near as I can gather is removing eligible voters from the delayed but mandated upcoming BoD elections). And looking through some of the other recent discussion, if the TDF majority group was hoping to come out of this looking like they're on the side of angels, they might want to get a refund on those tarnished halos.

[1]: https://community.documentfoundation.org/t/sorry-but-i-give-...

[2]: https://community.documentfoundation.org/t/vote-adopt-versio...

Re: The Document Foundation ejects its core developers

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you consider laziness? Why do you believe pointing to the manual is newbie friendly? In the Linux world, it took ages before it was newbie friendly (thinking Ubuntu and Mint). OpenBSD serves an important niche, but to brand it as newbie-friendly does OpenBSD a disservice. Or perhaps you mean newbie tolerant?

> What do you consider laziness? In this context, what I expanded above as foisting onto others the responsibility for the effort required by what we want to accomplish. > Why do you believe pointing to the manual is newbie friendly? To the documentation, which may or may not be a manpage; as it's usually done in response to a request for the information contained therein, I do find it reasonable. > OpenBSD serves an…

> We're discussing OpenBSD's community, not the system itself.

The community makes the system and decides what’s tolerable. That is to say, the community decides the type of users it expects to serve.

When your own example of laziness is to provide a script and someone fails to run a script; you’re comparing to a time when RTFM was the Linux norm. But those days where RTFM to newbies were tolerable are long gone.

So OpenBSD was the friendlier community then; it’s a niche and insular community today.

So while I agree it’s not a terrible community, I also wouldn’t say it’s inviting.

> I meant what I wrote, that I find the community to be the opposite of "notoriously terrible and unwelcoming to newbies," by which I do not imply newbie-friendliness in a kindergarten sense.

I mean, it’s not inviting to newbies either; which is the plain reading and understanding of “opposite” of what the OP stated.

Instead it’s “tolerant”, a term which for some reason you don’t seem to like.

I’d ask if you’re Theo, mainly due to the strange back and forth we’re having over semantics and a concern over the OpenBSD community reputation.

Re: The Document Foundation ejects its core developers

#177
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a feeling that the Open Document Foundation is going to end up being the loser here. Collabora is the entity that can fund development with a commercial offering. It sounds like they employ the core contributors to the project as well. 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 o…

OnlyOffice is not really open source. They say they are but they also add impossible conditions to their license. (you are forced to use their logo, but you are also not allowed to use their logo.)

It’s also a Russian company in Russia.

Re: The Document Foundation ejects its core developers

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What do you consider laziness? In this context, what I expanded above as foisting onto others the responsibility for the effort required by what we want to accomplish. > Why do you believe pointing to the manual is newbie friendly? To the documentation, which may or may not be a manpage; as it's usually done in response to a request for the information contained therein, I do find it reasonable. > OpenBSD serves an…

> We're discussing OpenBSD's community, not the system itself. The community makes the system and decides what’s tolerable. That is to say, the community decides the type of users it expects to serve. When your own example of laziness is to provide a script and someone fails to run a script; you’re comparing to a time when RTFM was the Linux norm. But those days where RTFM to newbies were tolerable are long gone. So…

> The community makes the system and decides what’s tolerable. That is to say, the community decides the type of users it expects to serve.

Sure, but the community isn't the system; it may inform the direction the system will take, but there isn't a 1:1 equivalence between their respective qualities at any point and across different levels. I made a statement about the OpenBSD community, you implied I was doing a disservice in making such statement about OpenBSD, so I pointed out the distinction.

> When your own example of laziness is to provide a script

We seem to be having different conversations. How did you get "provide a script and someone fails run a script" from "foisting onto others the responsibility for the effort required by what we want to accomplish"?

> So while I agree it’s not a terrible community, I also wouldn’t say it’s inviting.

So... We're mostly on the same page? I opposed someone's claim that it was "notoriously terrible and unwelcoming to newbies." I disagree on both counts. I didn't claim it to be inviting, however, which I find distinct from welcoming: I perceive the former as indicative of an active effort or the desire to attract new members or of is being perceive as attractive from the outside.

> I mean, it’s not inviting to newbies either; which is the plain reading and understanding of “opposite” of what the OP stated.

It's a community that can help a newbie grow in different ways; to increase in knowledge and refine the craft; to be demanding on oneself and to take criticism; so, I find it the opposite of "notoriously terrible."

It accepts anyone interested in learning and willing to make the effort to learn. The community cares about OpenBSD; someone likewise interested in OpenBSD won't be turned always due to politics. So, yes, I find it welcoming.

Is it for everyone? What is? The barbecue club may be the most welcoming place on earth without its being the best fit for a vegetarian.

> Instead it’s “tolerant”, a term which for some reason you don’t seem to like.

I don't see how my preferring my own choice of words over a proposed alternative is indicate of my having something against the latter.

You may want to consider how often, and specially how seriously, you engage with different viewpoints if your first reaction to what looks like is to suppose a mistake and the second is to assume a personal limitation.

> I’d ask if you’re Theo mainly due to the strange back and forth we’re having over semantics and a concern over the OpenBSD community reputation.

Someone commented. I disagreed. You disagreed — on semantics. I expanded. You pushed. And so on. I'm not seeing any of this as some battle for a community's reputation. It's just a discussion.

Re: The Document Foundation ejects its core developers

#179
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish we would admit that you can't have it all. You can't have a product that is open source with neutral foundation governance and also have that same product be de facto proprietary. People have been pushing this bait-and-switch business model for too long.

It was not really proprietary though? I don't like Collabora Office at all as a product (sorry, and I have tried) and the branding situation is super messy (sorry but it's true) but all the code is online.

Which free software license was it under?

Re: The Document Foundation ejects its core developers

#180

Is there any other article that actually details what is going on? I feel whiplash from reading this right after the Ruby Central fiasco.

You can read TDF's position: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/04/01/comment-...

If the Meeks' post gave the parent commenter whiplash, TDF's posts would cause brain damage.

They're as unreadable as they're vague.

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