German OpenOffice devs defect to LibreOffice

Dozens of people who have been responsible for developing and maintaining the German version of OpenOffice.org have quit.

On Sunday, project leads Marko Moeller and Jacqueline Rahemipour, along with 31 others, wrote an open letter to OpenOffice.org supporters, saying they were abandoning the project for its recent fork, LibreOffice.

LibreOffice is produced by The Document Foundation, which was formed in September, after Oracle took over OpenOffice.org sponsor Sun Microsystems. Oracle has not shown support for the Foundation or LibreOffice, and discussions within the OpenOffice.org community recently turned to the issue of conflict of interest.

"The cooperation and the common finding of solutions sometimes faces limitations. These are places where ideas on further development of the working platform, design or marketing do not match the ideas of the main sponsor or have just not been addressed or implemented because the responsible or (legally) capable entity does not make any decision," the letter read, going on to say a foundation was necessary to address these issues.

"Although it has been stressed several times that there will be collaboration on a technical level, and changes are possible — there is no indication from Oracle to change its mind on the question of the project organisation and management. For those who want to achieve such a change, but see no realistic opportunity within the current project and are therefore involved in the TDF, unfortunately this results in an 'either/or' question."

The signatories said they would continue to work as a team to develop and promote LibreOffice, and stressed that each individual had made a personal choice to leave their posts in the germanophone OpenOffice.org project.