For anyone that doesn't know him - Caolán has contributed amazing work on the LibreOffice code-base for over two decades, latterly for RedHat. He has pioneered work in many areas around LibreOffice:

• helping to found The Document Foundation, and contributing to its growth and governance
• handling security for LibreOffice, managing CVEs and patch porting
• maintaining our static checking with Coverity and others
• getting fuzzing working, tending oss-fuzz, and incorporating a large number of fixes to stop issues escaping in releases.
• tending our crash-testing of ~750k documents (~60Gb) of bug documents which we continually run through (thanks to hardware sponsorship from Adfinis) - maintaining the great quality of our filters.

We expect Caolán will continue to spend time on these as part of his role at Collabora; but of course this is only a subset of the things he has contributed for RedHat some highlights being:

• re-working the entire LibreOffice UI to use auto-layout instead of fixed-positions, it is hard to comprehend what a huge investment this represents - with over a thousand glade dialog fragments, with over half a million lines.
• adapting the UI toolkit to allow native gtk (& Javascript) widgets.
• maintaining our gtk backends to cope with the latest gtk churn^Wimprovements.
• various vital features such as printing comments in the margins in writer.
• getting almost every package in a RedHat distro to use the same Hunspell dictionaries.
• complex text rendering & layout, fixing innumerable bugs, improving the user-experience and much more.

RedHat was instrumental in founding The Document Foundation, and has invested far more than we had any right to expect through its team over a long period; they deserve our thanks. I expect that LibreOffice will still be available from flathub going forward. However with RedHat now choosing to laser focus its development investment into the open hybrid cloud, it became clear that in order for us to continue to enjoy Caolán's contribution - he would need a new home.

Happily - this circumstance is rather similar to the history of Collabora Productivity's founding with the direction changes at SUSE, and we could act quickly. The paid and volunteer team around the code-base continues to grow. However, it is is important that we retain skills, and continue to deepen the talent pool around LibreOffice Technology and Collabora Online as circumstances change.

The Collabora team is looking forward to working with Caolán to continue his work in three areas: on the underlying LibreOffice Technology, serving our customers as part of our growing (we're hiring) team, and of course to make Collabora Online even better for our partners and customers. Welcome Caolán!