GoKawiilIn recent times several refreshingly non-conventional ‘strategic’ approaches have been pioneered: such as stacking the TDF board with non-technical, affiliated staff while at the same time accusing others of historic conflicts of interest; overriding past board and engineering steering committee decisions and violating their own processes to drag code out of the attic to enable competing with their largest single contributor. This last apparently with no clear technical plan beyond “to start a discussion”. Novel TDF schemes that we’ve tried to discourage have been: spending donors’ money to take legal action against blameless, volunteer, ex-board members for seemingly contrived reasons, or threatening those that contribute to the project for using the normally free to use LibreOffice trademark under license, while ignoring the widespread misuse of the mark by unlicensed non-contributors.
Another innovation has been a new tendering policy: voted through full of regression bugs and FIXMEs, or perhaps TDF incredibly not paying for tendered code under contracts that had been delivered (oh and meanwhile selling that in app-stores), or perhaps delaying and overturning elections after they are run, or dramatic changes to TDF’s bylaws by a rump-board. Or a different scheme – ejecting conference organizers Gabriel Massei and Gabor Kelemen for similarly nonsensical reasons, the latter in mid-organization of the annual conference – who nobly continued to deliver that. We could spend a week enumerating the contributions of those unfairly removed, how about Andras Timar who was responsible for creating our translation infrastructure, but let’s not get too deeply into this deep well of tangled incoherence; so where is the good news