Disunity at The Document Foundation
The Document Foundation (TDF) was created in 2010 to steward and support the development of the LibreOffice suite, which was then a new fork of OpenOffice.org. TDF has clearly been successful; unlike OpenOffice, which is currently under the Apache umbrella, LibreOffice is an actively developed and widely used project. But TDF has also been showing signs of stress in recent years, and the situation does not appear to be getting better. There are currently some significant disagreements over just what role TDF should play; if those cannot be resolved, there is a real chance that they could rip the Foundation apart.
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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.