According to the French IT news site LeMagIT.fr, The Document Foundation, an open source institution in charge of the governance of the LibreOffice suite, has decided to withdraw the French government's participation in its advisory board. The French government had been represented in the community since 2013 through the Mimo inter-ministerial working group.
This group validates a distribution of LibreOffice for several French ministries. Public agents can then install it on their workstations. For example, patches are developed to meet the needs of each public department.
Mimo was a member of TDF's advisory board as a "free" member. These free members are actively contributing to the LibreOffice community, while those who do not wish to be involved in contributions must pay a grant.
Lack of resources
Due to a lack of resources and of commitments from some ministries, Mimo was unable to respect its original promises, reveals LeMagIT.fr. “Although we completely understand that a government body has different issues from an enterprise when it comes to putting resources on a free open source software project, it becomes clear to both parties that the situation would not change - at least for the foreseeable future – then we decided to withdraw the "free" seat”, said the TDF to LeMagIT.fr. “It was a shared decision, and we do not blame Mimo for not having fulfilled the original commitment”, he added.
Mimo had submitted about only fifty commits to the foundation to fix bugs, far from being enough to be at the TDF Advisory Board, revealed an anonymous source to the French website. “Only a small group of people can work on these contributions”, the source said.
Since this decision this summer, Mimo has been working “to regain trust” and has published an official fork of LibreOffice on the TDF’s development branch, LeMagIT.fr said.