The Document Foundation was created in 2010 with a single, non-negotiable premise: that a free, fully-featured office suite, built on open standards and governed in the public interest, is infrastructure for democracy. Not a product. Not a market position. Infrastructure, the kind that belongs to everyone and can be taken from no one. Sixteen years later, that premise is under pressure. And it is worth stating clearly, on the record, what TDF is, what it has done, what it is doing, and why the decisions it has made – including the difficult ones – follow directly from the founding commitment rather than betraying it. What a Foundation Is For Our foundation, like many others, exists to hold something in trust. Not for its current contributors, not for its most prolific developers and not for the companies that build products on top of its work, but for the public, across time. That is not a bureaucratic abstraction. It is a legal and ethical obligation that governs every decision the Board of Directors makes. In Germany, where TDF is registered, such obligations are enforced by law. A gemeinnützige Stiftung – a foundation with charitable status – operates under strict rules designed to

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/45719790

The Document Foundation was created in 2010 with a single, non-negotiable premise: that a free, fully-featured office suite, built on open standards and governed in the public interest, is infrastructure for democracy. Not a product. Not a market position. Infrastructure, the kind that belongs to everyone and can be taken from no one.

Sixteen years later, that premise is under pressure. And it is worth stating clearly, on the record, what TDF is, what it has done, what it is doing, and why the decisions it has made – including the difficult ones – follow directly from the founding commitment rather than betraying it.

  • barryamelton@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    12 days ago

    Quite well written post. That Collabora (the unnamed entity) has chosen to extort the foundation and use its power to make the foundation fail its legal promises (and therefore force it to be disolved legally), only speaks badly of Collabora.