Following the fork in the open office suite development and the foundation of The Document Foundation, the dispute with main sponsor Oracle appears to have come to a head. More than 30 leading figures in the German-language section who have previously donated their time to the OpenOffice.org project have announced their resignations. They include almost all of the core figures in the German-language branch of the project, which now finds itself without leadership.

Oracle's decision to decline to get involved with the Document Foundation and its announcement that it planned to continue to develop OpenOffice was followed by a call from an Oracle employee and OpenOffice.org council member Louis Suárez-Potts for council members with a connection with the Document Foundation to resign due to a conflict of interest. Since Oracle has so far refused to give ground on the issues over project organisation and leadership, the majority of developers not actually employed by Oracle have decided in future to devote themselves fully to The Document Foundation and developing and promoting LibreOffice.

Their valedictory letter affirms the necessity of doing so "in order to give the community and the software it works on the opportunity to reach its full potential." The letter claims that, in the past, despite strong collaboration with Sun and Oracle in areas such as quality assurance and translation, this has not always been possible and there have been repeated misunderstandings and debate. As a result many ideas for further development in the areas of software, design or marketing have been allowed to fall by the wayside or have not been implemented, because they either failed to coincide with the main sponsor's vision or because of the inability to take a decision.

The signatories to the letter include co-leads Jacqueline Rahemipour and Marko Moeller, developer Thorsten Behrens and marketing and media leads Florian Effenberger and Thomas Krumbein, the latter also head of OpenOffice.org Deutschland e.V..

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(crve)