Hi all,
I’d like to split out one of the radical new bylaws proposals here, and examine it - emphasis mine:
There are a number of significant problems with this that are worth discussing:
-
Since around 2020 we have suffered a dramatic increase in disputes inside TDF’s governance. TDF has managed to get into a distressing number of disputes with a very varied set of parties: its own advisory-board members, lawyers, organizational development specialists, past and current directors, on and on, and this seems to continue to escalate.
-
the TDF MC has started ejecting members, without the required hearing in an arbitrary fashion. It is worth noting that the statutes in translation have:
another unhelpful mis-translation of the German, and should read non-arbitrary.
-
‘have a dispute or a case’ is highly under-defined. Can someone clarify the meaning of it ? There seems to be no due process, no form of appeal or hearing. is it entirely decided by the board who they dispute with ? as written this seems to completely break the separation of powers between board and MC - and allows the board to eject whomever they wish to dispute with.
-
this trigger affects individuals affiliated with a company/organization (corporate citizens), but weirdly not individuals in dispute/case. That seems to contradicts equality concerns elsewhere in the document.
-
The scope grows further: affiliate organization (in the German statutes “daughter-organization”) seems to have been radically re-defined here to be all encompassing: including commercial partnerships, distributorship, consortia, etc. Clearly through TDFs lifetime we’ve had many organizations on the board that have concurrently been shared members of many consortia: eg. The Linux Foundation, OIN, LOT, OpenStack, and on and on… Asserting that these have then all essentially been a single entity seems a verbose and complicated way to say: “we want a board primarily composed only of staff and unaffiliated individuals”
Is it really the case that some of the board propose a mass editing of the membership to exclude corporate citizens ? many of these have contributed vast amounts of software, advocacy and goodwill; to do that on the basis of potentially contrived disputes or cases - with no due process or safeguards ?
If applied to Collabora Productivity - could TDF really represent itself as an inclusive meritocracy after expelling large numbers of its longest standing members and founders, without due process, and particularly those who have sacrificed hugely in support of LibreOffice ? We have tried to build an environment where co-investment with our partners drives the success of LibreOffice technology, and accelerates free software - should individuals associated with those partners be penalised too ?
This section is shocking - and needs significant re-work or removal, it seems to step way outside the statutes intent and letter. Has it been reviewed by a Rechtsanwalt I wonder ?
Lets rewind fifteen or so years to a totally different world at the beginning of TDF at a time that Microsoft was seen as implacably hostile to FLOSS, and we were in disputation with Sun/Oracle and IBM. It was common then to have the question publicly asked: what if an employee of these wants to join, and the general answer was: all are welcome to contribute and be represented.
How have we gone from there to here in five years ?
Regards,
Michael.