LibreOffice: the origins of a community fork

by Italo Vignoli

At: FOSDEM 2019

LibreOffice was announced in September 2010 as a fork of OOo, by a group of active members of the OOo community who were worried by Oracle acquiring Sun. They decided to create an organization capable of growing the LibreOffice project based on five founding principles: copyleft license, no contributor agreement, meritocracy, independence from vendor(s), and community governance. The talk will cover the history and governance peculiarities of The Document Foundation. The Document Foundation (TDF), based in Germany, is the not for profit home of LibreOffice and the Document Liberation projects. Although is a German foundation, it has members who are at the same time the owners of the foundation and those who decide the governance, as they elect the Board of Directors and the Membership Committee from a list of candidates who have to be TDF members. TDF is based on five founding principles: copyleft license, no contributor agreement, meritocracy, independence from vendor(s), and community governance. Governance and statutes are hevily influenced by the previous experience at OOo, i.e. there isn't any community manager, there aren't any formal roles, and there isn't any formal mechanism for involving people (which makes people involvement a challenge). On the other hand, the community is growing nicely even without these people being appointed and a specific mechanism, but of course there are some issues like in any other community. The talk will briefly summarize the challenges we had to face in term of governance, and hopefully foster a discussion on the topic.

Room: UA2.220 (Guillissen)
Scheduled start: 2019-02-02 12:30:00+01