This plausibly demonstrates why a nonprofit may not be a great vehicle for some free software projects - while the nonprofit should do whats best for the project, if the main work is done by commercial sponsors then it’s crucial those sponsors feel the relationship is beneficial.

The reality is free software office apps require significant professional development input. Apache Open Office is the obvious example.

It’s a classic version of the tragedy of the commons. If Collabora goes off to its own thing, I struggle to believe they will maintain the development rate with new devs, and without development the TDF sponsorship will fall off.

I hope we are not looking back in two years time regretting this.

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coliveira an hour ago | parent [-]

You're considering open source development as just another commercial endeavor. The fact that this is done by a nonprofit organization means it's pursuing goals that are not strictly commercial, and that is fine. Think about the GNU project as another example. If someone is not happy with that, it is always possible to start their own company.

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dangus an hour ago | parent [-]

I don’t think they’re considering it a commercial endeavor, they’re just acknowledging that complex open source projects often require paid work to effectively maintain and develop them.

The GNU project works because it’s a bunch of small packages that are each maintained by approximately one person each for free on their spare time.

LibreOffice is a complex office suite that essentially competes with a multi-billion dollar industry of complex office applications and services.

It’s also an open source project that has pretty much always depended on corporate sponsorship and a paid variant rather than having some other form financial backing (e.g., it never went the Wikipedia route of being completely free for everyone and only surviving on donations).

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hackze an hour ago | parent [-]

Do you consider GNU Emacs a small package?

	▲	Seattle3503 23 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I don't think they were talking about the size of the codebase. How much funding does emacs require to maintain?