Dear fellow members of the community,

As you might be aware, after months of discussions, it has been
concluded that the best solution is to split the community.

However, the split is going to happen at application level. The
maintainer of each application will be asked to consult his fellow
developers to decide in which group, A or B, the application will
lived. The other group is free to fork the application under a
different name. It is also possible for the developers to change the
application name and ask that the current name is not used by any of
the group. This can be used as an opportunity for a fresh start.

Currently, to the best of my knowledge the groups are composed of the
following applications:

Group A: KWord

Group B: KPresenter, Krita, Karbon, Kexi

Since the license give the right for a fork, I can already mention
that Group B will come with a fork of KWord, under a name that has yet
to be decided. Group A is free to fork any application of Group B
under a different name.

Maintainers have until Sunday October 31th to decide with which group
to go. Applications that have not choosen a group will have to be
renamed by each group.

The KDE e.V. board will be asked to decide what happen to the KOffice
name, the KOffice website, the KOffice mailing list, KOffice.org,
KOffice wiki and the KOffice bugzilla product. The recommendation from
members of the CWG is to retire the name KOffice altogether, which
will allow both side to start on a fresh start and leave the past
behind. Then the application maintainers and developers of each group
will have one week to find a new name for their suite, and move to
another place in the KDE subversion tree and to rename or remove the
applications that are in the other group.

In the meantime, I am suspending the KOffice release process, meaning
that I will release Beta 3, but that the date for the following
release is undefined. The reason is that I do not feel confident that
the splitting will happen in time before the RC1, and I do not think
it is a good idea to ship a RC release that will get different
applications than the final release. If the splitting takes more time,
I will proceed with one more beta. I also advise each group to ensure
that they have a release coordinator.

I will urge readers of this letter to:

1) refrain discussion around the splitting outside the mailing list,
or to do so in private conversation

2) acknowledge, that at this point there is no sense in trying to
place the blame anywhere, we just have to accept the fact

3) remain civilised and polite in this difficult moment

--

Cyrille Berger Skott