Viability

Great, it's encouraging that under pressure they do the right thing this once (for a minor release). However - is it ultimately effective? As has been said TDF is not and should not be a marketing arm of any company - they have put links on their website before but I'm not convinced they can ever be really effective. The what is 0.05% picture in the "TDF marketing in practice" section of my write-up of years ago - suggests that. We already know that this model doesn't work for the ecosystem - it has been tried, measured and documented as failing over many years.

Worse than this - scandalously we have seen TDF try to play king-makers in the past, ordering and sorting lists of contributors and giving top billing to competing companies who contribute next-to-nothing, while down-ranking those who did the actual work. To make any convincing commitment to future good behavior, there is a desperate need to build confidence in TDF's governance which seems to be near collapse. MC elections overturned after they were run, an illegitimate rump board whose term has expired, with no date for overdue elections to start, with several of the top ranked directors having resigned, a board ramming through radical changes in bylaws non-consensually and with no sensible drafting process, publishing inflated accusations of CoI (ironically by those who should really introspect themselves). There is a massive bonfire of goodwill there, perhaps TDF will recover - but who can say.

Clearly the best, and easiest approach here is for the work that Collabora has done creating (almost by itself) Collabora Online - to be branded in a way that reflects that contribution ie. as COOL, and not by forking that to pass it off under the LibreOffice Online brand. That of course is/was the status quo before this action. Their chart shows that some huge chunk of the investment needed to make the LibreOffice desktop brand a success also comes from Collabora - why trample that goodwill ?

So - too-little, too-late, too-uncertain, doing somewhat better just this once and sufficiently weak that it seems deeply unlikely to fuel the virtuous cycle of relevance and re-investment necessary to rocket-power FLOSS Office when done like this.

For those that like comic relief, I like to escape to another world where there is a fun fair with a road to it.