Document Foundation swaps board seats with KDE and Gnome

The Document Foundation will exchange board members with the Gnome Foundation and KDE eV. It does so to strengthen the ties between the Document Foundation and both free software organizations, and to benefit from each other’s expertise.

The Document Foundation, known for LibreOffice, among others, is an ‘independent, self-governing meritocratic organization’. as she states on her site. The group consists of people who are committed to free software. To improve both the integration of LibreOffice and the development of other floss projects, it was decided to collaborate with both organizations through the exchange of board members.

All three organizations are involved in developing the floss desktop, where floss stands for Free/Libre and Open Source Software. This is not to be confused with free in English. Both the Gnome and KDE desktop environments are based on free and open source software.

In a post on the Document Foundation’s site, Lydia Pintscher, president of KDE eV, says they are “happy to share their years of experience.” According to her, the aim of the Document Foundation is the same: ‘to achieve a world in which everyone has control over their digital life, while having freedom and privacy’. This requires strong partnerships, Pintscher concludes.

In another post on the same site, Gnome also sees it as very important that “competitive free software products” are offered to as many people as possible. Shaun McCane, president of the board of the Gnome Foundation, sees the collaboration as an “exciting new chapter in the relationship between the two projects.”