Comment by advisedwang

OK here's my understanding:

- LibreOfficeOnLine (LOOL) was created within The Document Foundation (TDF) but largely developed by Collabora. It was source only and suggested users pay a company to host for them.

- Some within TDF wanted to offer LOOL as a binary offering.

- Collabora moved their contributions to Collabora Online, which they controlled.

- LOOL was archived.

- More recently, LOOL was revived

- Collabora is pissed

- Collabora gets booted from TDF

I suppose this is a fundamental issue with the model of a foundation "owning" a product but a separate for profit company doing all the work. There's always going to be some issue that the two sides disagree on (in this case, how the free version is distributed). The foundation then either has to give in*, and become irrelevant or stand up for their own position, in which case the company is basically forced to pull out their co-operation. It seems unlikely that TDF will be able to make any product progress, and I bet in a few years collabora gets what they want and returns to the fold. TDF will either be cowed forever or this situation will just repeat on the next conflict.

* Like with OpenAI, where the for-benefit part eventually capitulated and became an vestigial organ of a for-profit business.