Disunity at The Document Foundation

Foundations and attics

Financial support for TDF comes primarily from a set of companies that are working with the LibreOffice code. All of these companies have a shared interest in a strong and active ecosystem around LibreOffice. That agreement tends to come to an end, though, when supporters feel that their contributions to TDF are being used to compete with them in the market. TDF supporters, it seems, want a development community that is strong, but not so strong that it doesn't leave them space for value-added services and products. Other members of the community, though, are mostly interested in the best LibreOffice that they can make and are indifferent to the prospect of impacting some company's revenue stream.

Tensions around this point had evidently simmered for some time before Michael Meeks (of Collabora) made them public in 2020:

Frustration with how TDF markets and positions its 'product' (LibreOffice) against the ecosystem that contributes the majority of the coding work is at an all-time high. That ecosystem itself is under long term stress.

In short, the version of LibreOffice created by TDF is sufficiently good that nobody felt the need to pay for support services. One approach for dealing with that problem was to brand the free LibreOffice as a "personal edition" and, perhaps, allow new features to go into paid "enterprise" editions (sold by TDF member companies) for some time before being added to the free version.

Needless to say, this idea was not universally popular. Even less popular was Collabora's decision to stop working on LibreOffice Online, a version of LibreOffice that provides collaborative editing of documents over the net. Collabora, which had been the principal (but not only) contributor to this code, is now developing it separately and marketing it under its Collabora Online branding instead. To Collabora, this move was a way to preserve the revenue stream from its LibreOffice work.

Others, though, saw it as a sort of looting of the LibreOffice commons by a single company. They were even less pleased in January 2022, when the Foundation's board proposed moving the LibreOffice Online code into an "attic", where it would no longer be part of the LibreOffice code base. Development of this code had stopped after Collabora left the building, so some saw it as an increasingly stagnant embarrassment to TDF. Others, though, saw the move as closing off any future community development of the online functionality. After months of tense discussion, the TDF board voted in July to delay the "atticization" of LibreOffice Online for now. This unresolved issue still hangs over the community.

TDF developers

The big argument over the last few months, though, is on a related topic: whether TDF should employ developers of its own and, if so, what those developers should work on. In February, board member Paolo Vecchi (Omnis Cloud Sarl) proposed that TDF should hire some developers of its own; the two suggested positions would work on creating a presence for LibreOffice in app stores, among many other things. (Then) board member Jan Holesovsky (Collabora), instead, argued that TDF needed mentors to support developers elsewhere: "teaching how to fish, not fishing itself".

There followed an intense conversation that continues to this day. Some participants feel that TDF should not be in the business of employing software developers — or even that, according to its bylaws, it cannot do so. Others see TDF-based developers as the core of a strong LibreOffice going forward. Yet others can accept developers employed by TDF, but want strong constraints on what those developers should be doing.

These viewpoints have been expressed in several interminable threads arguing over the proper role of TDF, with accusations of conflicts of interest flying in all directions. Much of the conversation was evidently in private, and it is hard to determine what the actual course of events was but, at some point, Vecchi and Holesovsky got together and put a serious effort into the creation of a proposal for the hiring of developers that would be acceptable to all involved. As part of this effort, Holesovsky backed down from the "not fishing" position and accepted that development could be done within TDF. Numerous versions of the proposal resulted from this dialog as various issues were worked out.

As of this writing, version 3.1 is the latest attempt. It makes the claim that TDF can support the community by employing developers to work on LibreOffice, especially if they focus on otherwise neglected areas. Suggested targets include better support of right-to-left and CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) text, accessibility, interoperability with non-native file formats, and fixing of regressions: "there are 12.6K open bugs in TDF Bugzilla, of which 1.3K of them are regressions". The proposal also makes it clear that these developers will not work on long-term-support or "enterprise" versions of LibreOffice.

A sticking point

It seemed like things were getting closer to a conclusion, but there was, at a minimum, a disagreement over one stipulation in version 3.0:

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.

This language goes to the core of the disagreement over TDF's role. Some participants do not feel that a vendor-neutral organization — that they are supporting — should be competing with them. Others, instead, do not accept the idea that member companies should be able to carve out pieces of the application space and prevent TDF-supported community development in those areas. Positions on both sides appear to be firmly entrenched.

At the beginning of November, Holesovsky publicly resigned from the TDF board:

It has come to the point when I am sick and tired of all the accusations and passive aggression against me and others. It has just become folklore in this community: "when you don't agree with somebody, accuse them that they do that because of commercial interests".

In other words, TDF has moved from a meritocracy (where the doers decide) to some kind of "shouting-ocracy" (where the vigorous shouters decide).

The resignation of one of its authors notwithstanding, on November 24, Vecchi put version 3.1 of the proposal to a vote of the board, suggesting that all of the disagreements had now been resolved. The controversial text quoted above is gone; in its place, the proposal reads:

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.

It quickly became clear that the promised consensus did not actually exist, though. Board member Cor Nouws (Nou&Off) stated that an alternative proposal was privately in the works; that proposal still has not been seen in public, but Emiliano Vavassori (another board member, whose affiliation is given as "a small company based in Bergamo") has decried the process under which it is being developed. Most board members, meanwhile, simply declined to vote on the proposal, with the result that it failed due to a lack of quorum. Board chair Thorsten Behrens (allotropia software GmbH) said that "this proposal is not ready to vote on", and Holesovsky resurfaced to say that: "That version is not balanced, and Paolo’s unwillingness to find balance there was one of the main reasons to my resignation". Meeks compared the discussion to "the Christmas pantomime season complete with comedy audience contradictions".

That is where the situation stands as of this writing.

The TDF board may yet find a way to hire a developer or two into the Foundation to work on neglected parts of that huge application. But that, honestly, is not TDF's biggest problem at the moment. Somehow, its membership has to find a way to clarify what the role of TDF should be and to rebuild trust and good will among its members. No organization can function indefinitely in a climate of distrust and acrimony, and that sort of climate is even more corrosive to a free-software development community. Those of us who depend on LibreOffice can only hope that this community will resolve its tensions before they lead to a breakdown and fork of the type that led to TDF's creation twelve years ago.