“There has been a lot of commentary in recent days about the
OpenOffice.org community council decision to ask people who have
aligned themselves with The Document Foundation (TDF) to resign
their seats on the council. So, of course, what we need is a little
bit more commentary.“First, when reading the minutes, it’s worth noting that this
was not a voted decision. At 21:50, Louis Suarez-Potts proposed
“that the TDF members of the CC consider the points those of us who
have not joined TDF have made about conflict of interest and
confusion [and] resign their offices, so as to remove the apparent
conflict of interest their current representational roles produce”.
He then proposed a deadline of Tuesday “to deal with this” –
by emergency meeting of the council. So there was no decision to
expel anyone, Louis made a proposal which did not obtain a
consensus decision. That said, reading the minutes, there is clear
alignment between supporters of TDF on one side and the rest of the
council on the other side. And “the rest of the council” is Louis
Suarez-Potts, Andreas Bartel, Eike Rathke, Juergen Schmidt,
Matthias Huetsch and Martin Hollmichel on behalf of Stefan Taxhet
– all Oracle employees.”