Thirty-three developers have now quit their roles in OpenOffice.org in order to devote their efforts to LibreOffice and the Document Foundation. And this is expected to be just the beginning of a flood of resignations.

As we reported at the end of September, members of OpenOffice.org have formed an independent foundation and made available the first beta of its open source office productivity suite, LibreOffice.

The Document Foundation has the support of  almost the entire OpenOffice programming community, including Novell, Red Hat and Google, but not from Oracle, which declined to join and has declared its intention of continuing with OpenOffice.

A call for members of  the Document Foundation to resign from OpenOffice.org was made on 14th October during the meeting of the OOo Community Council Meeting but was resisted on the grounds that there was no conflict of interest, see OpenOffice Fork becoming a Split.

Now Jacqueline Rahemipour, the Lead of the German Language Project, and 32 others (including Christoph Noack and Florian Effenberger whose resignations had already been made public) have, as a team, withdrawn from the OpenOffice.org Germanohpone project.

In her letter Jacqueline Rahemipour explains:

Oracle's official response to the announcement of The Document Foundation was clear – Oracle will continue OpenOffice.org as usual. The result is now indeed the lately postulated conflict of interest for those community members who are in charge of or representing project, but to whom it is not enough "to continue working as we always did". 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 it's mind on the question of the project organization 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 answer for us who sign this letter is clear: We want a change to give the community as well as the software it develops the opportunity to evolve. For this reason, from now on we will support The Document Foundation and will – as a team - develop and promote LibreOffice. We hope that many are going to join us on this path.

So, it seems, we can expect further regignations in the coming days and weeks.

Previous news items:

New bid for freedom by OpenOffice

OpenOffice fork is real

OpenOffice Fork becoming a Split

Trickle of resignations from OpenOffice.org