We have bold and ongoing plans to create an entirely new, cut-down, differentiated Collabora Office for users that is smoother, more user friendly, and less feature dense than our Classic product (which will continue to be supported for years for our partners). This gives a chance to innovate faster in a separate place on a smaller, more focused code-base with fewer build configurations, much less legacy, no Java, no database, web-based toolkit and more. We are excited to get executing on that.

To make this process easier, and to put to bed complaints about having our distro branches in TDF gerrit, and to move to self-hosted FOSS tooling we are launching our own gerrit to host our existing branch of core, more details on how git works here. To get involved this will mean creating a new account on the system and a few hours of disruption while our CI systems are moved over. We will continue to make contributions to LibreOffice where that makes sense (if we are welcome to), but it clearly no longer makes much sense to continue investing heavily in building what remains of TDF’s community and product for them – while being excluded from its governance. In this regard, we seem to be back where we were fifteen years ago. Meanwhile TDF continues to hire developers, sells LibreOffice and starts to act more like a staff-controlled collective than a Free Software project.