TDF ejects its core developers

Stuff Michael Meeks is doing |

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For a rather more polished write-up, complete with pretty pictures please see TDF ejects its core developers. Here is a more personal take. My feeling is that this action has been planned by the TDF rump board's majority for many months, if not for some years. While we have tried to avoid this outcome, it has been eventually forced on us.

There are many great ways to contribute to FLOSS projects and coding is only one of them - let me underline that. However - coding is the primary production that drives many of the other valuable contributions: translation, marketing, etc. We have been blessed to have many excellent developers around LibreOffice but coder's board representation has been declining. This means losing a valuable part of the board's perspective on the complexity of the problem. The elected board is (typically) ten people - seven full board members, and three deputies as spares if needed, here is how that looks:

Another way of looking at board composition is to look at board members' affiliations over time. Of course affiliations change - sometimes during a board term, but this is the same graph broken down by (rough) affiliation:

One of the major surprises of the 2024 election is the 'TDF' chunk in which I bucket paid TDF staff, and those closely related to them. The current chair of the TDF board (Eliane) who manages the Executive Director (ED) is curiously related to a staff member who is managed by the (ED) - arguably an extremely poor governance practice. Having three TDF affiliated directors is also in contradiction of the statutes.

It is also worth noting that for over two years, no Collaboran or any of our partners have been on the TDF board. It was hoped that this would give ample time and space to address any of the issues left from previous boards.

TDF is defined as a meritocracy in its statutes. Why is that ? the experience we had from the OpenOffice project was that often those who were doing the work were excluded from decision making. That made it hard to get teams to scale, and to make quick decisions, let leaders grow in areas, and also gives an incentive to contribute more among many other reasons.

Some claim that the sole manifestation of the statute's requirement for meritocracy is a flat entry / membership criteria (as every other organization has). This seems to me to be near to the root of the problems here. Those used to functioning FLOSS projects find it hard to understand why you wouldn't at least listen to those who are working hardest to improve things in whatever area. These days some at TDF seem to emphasize equality instead.

It is interesting then to see the (controversially appointed) Membership Committee overturning the last election - ejecting people without any thanks or apology who have contributed so very much over so many years. We built a quick tool to count those. This excludes the long departed Sun Microsystem's release engineers who committed many other people's patches for them - and it struggles to 'see' into the CVS era where branches were flattened; but ... as far as git and gitdm-alias files can easily tell this is the picture of the top committers to the largest 'core' code repository over all time.

| Name | Commits | Last commit | Affiliation | |---|---|---|---| | Caolán McNamara | 37,556 | Collabora | | | Stephan Bergmann | 21,732 | Collabora | | | Noel Grandin | 20,851 | Collabora | | | Miklos Vajna | 10,466 | Collabora | | | Tor Lillqvist | 9,233 | Collabora | | | Michael Stahl | 8,742 | Collabora | | | Kohei Yoshida | 5,655 | Collabora | | | Eike Rathke | 5,398 | Volunteer/RedHat | | | Markus Mohrhard | 5,230 | Volunteer | | | Frank Schönheit | 5,025 | 2011 | Sun/Oracle | | Michael Weghorn | 4,956 | TDF | | | Mike Kaganski | 4,864 | Collabora | | | Andrea Gelmini | 4,582 | Volunteer | | | Xisco Fauli | 4,215 | TDF | | | Julien Nabet | 4,031 | Volunteer | | | Tomaž Vajngerl | 3,797 | Collabora | | | David Tardon | 3,648 | 2021 | RedHat | | Luboš Luňák | 3,201 | Collabora | | | Hans-Joachim Lankenau | 3,007 | 2011 | Sun/Oracle | | Ocke Janssen | 2,852 | 2011 | Sun/Oracle | | Oliver Specht | 2,699 | Sun/Oracle | | | Jan Holesovsky | 2,689 | Collabora | | | Mathias Bauer | 2,580 | 2011 | Sun/Oracle | | Olivier Hallot | 2,561 | TDF | | | Michael Meeks | 2,553 | Collabora | | | Bjoern Michaelsen | 2,503 | Volunteer/Canonical | | | Norbert Thiebaud | 2,176 | 2017 | Volunteer | | Thomas Arnhold | 2,176 | 2014 | Volunteer | | Andras Timar | 2,099 | Collabora | | | Philipp Lohmann | 2,096 | 2011 | Sun/Oracle |

It is a humbling privilege for me to serve in such a dedicated team of people who have contributed so much. Take just one example - Cáolan has worked from StarDivision to Sun to Oracle to RedHat to Collabora; 37000 commits in ~25 years - ~four per day sustained, every day. By grokking his commits quickly you can see that this is far more than a job - over 6000 of those were at the weekend, and of course commits don't show the reviews, mentoring, love and care and more. That is just one contributor - but the passion scales across the rest of the team.

While writing this a response from TDF showed up. While there are things to welcome, it seems that this speculative concern about individual contributors is at the core of the concern:

"people made decisions in the interest of their employers rather than in the interest of The Document Foundation."

Really!? the primary privilege that members of TDF have is voting for their representatives in elections, and this right is earned only by contribution. Elections are secret ballots. So it seems the most plausible reason for disenfranchising so many is a unhealthy fear of the electorate. Is it possible that the board majority want to avoid accountability for their actions at the next election (which is already delayed without adequate explanation), like this:

I have no idea how our staff voted in past elections - but I have to assume they did this with integrity and for the best for TDF as they saw it at the time. It seems that a more plausible reason to remove such long term contributors is electoral gerrymandering.

After 15+ years of service with LibreOffice, it is unfortunate to be ejected. It is possible to imagine a counter-factual world where this might actually be necessary. But even in this case - to do so with no thank-you, or apology is unconscionable. It is great to see the team making up for that by publicly thanking their colleagues as they are kicked out. I found it deeply encouraging to remember and celebrate all the fantastic work that has been contributed, let me add my own big thank you to everyone!

Well much more can be said, perhaps I'll update this later with more details as they emerge, but for now we're re-focusing on making Collabora Office great, getting our gerrit and CI humming smoothly, and starting to dung-out bits we are not using in the code-base. If you're interested in getting involved have a wave in #cool-dev:matrix.org and join in, we welcome anyone to join us. Thanks for reading and trying to understand this tangled topic !