Let's put an end to the speculation - TDF Community Blog

Ideally, we would have preferred to avoid this post. However, the articles and comments published in response to Collabora’s and Michael Meeks’ biased posts compel us to provide this background information on the events that led to the current situation. Unfortunately, we have to start from the very beginning, but we’ll try to keep it brief. The launch of the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation was handled with great enthusiasm by the founding group. They were driven by a noble goal, but also by a bit of healthy recklessness. After all, it was impossible to imagine what would happen after September 28, 2010, the date of the announcement. At the time, nobody could imagine that the companies that had supported OpenOffice.org until then would create a project to kill LibreOffice. Also, if the project were to be successful, it would require resources greater than those available, and above all, a deep management experience. Fortunately, the project grew quite rapidly. However, the founders’ different backgrounds and opinions were at the same time the reason for some bold decisions – many of which right – as well as a few mistakes, which are the root cause of some of the current

TDF Community Blog

Meeks' blog post, for comparison:

https://www.collaboraonline.com/blog/tdf-ejects-its-core-dev...

Note the references to legal issues; draw your own conclusions.

> at the same time accusing others of historic conflicts of interest

Collabora clearly has a conflict of interest, as their Collabora Office products both benefit from, and compete with LibreOffice proper. They even allude to that conflict of interest in the next sentence:

> overriding past board and engineering steering committee decisions and violating their own processes to drag code out of the attic to enable competing with their largest single contributor

A non-profit dedicated to promoting open source software should do what is best for that project and its users regardless of if doing so steps on the toes of corporate sponsors.

This plausibly demonstrates why a nonprofit may not be a great vehicle for some free software projects - while the nonprofit should do whats best for the project, if the main work is done by commercial sponsors then it’s crucial those sponsors feel the relationship is beneficial.

The reality is free software office apps require significant professional development input. Apache Open Office is the obvious example.

It’s a classic version of the tragedy of the commons. If Collabora goes off to its own thing, I struggle to believe they will maintain the development rate with new devs, and without development the TDF sponsorship will fall off.

I hope we are not looking back in two years time regretting this.

You're considering open source development as just another commercial endeavor. The fact that this is done by a nonprofit organization means it's pursuing goals that are not strictly commercial, and that is fine. Think about the GNU project as another example. If someone is not happy with that, it is always possible to start their own company.
For those of us with zero context, what's the story here?
I'd go for the discussion on Meeks' post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47599305
The Document Foundation ejects its core developers | Hacker News

Not sure myself, it seems like some of the founders were kicked out in 2025 for "misuse of funds" according to the auditor of TDF / or the Foundation authorities?

https://community.documentfoundation.org/t/well-known-high-c...

Also found this in the annual report, sounds quite serious:

> In 2023, following a request by the Foundation Authorities in Berlin, given the size our foundation has grown into over the last decade, TDF was audited, and a report was sent back to Berlin. The Board of Directors is working with the authorities to implement the improvements suggested by the audit

https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/fsqeJZrAtXeR7JD?d...

Would be helpful if the blog post was more clear about this

Well known, high contributors were removed

Let me help with the requests for the reasons the MC gave to push me/others out. I think these are useful to get the relevant questions listed - of course with reference to our rules, the statutes. Subject: Re: [tdf-membership] [TDF Membership] Application of Cor Nouws was not approved Date: Wed, 08 Jan 2025 12:19:18 -0300 From: Gustavo Buzzatti Pacheco [email protected] Organization: The Document Foundation To: [email protected] CC: [email protected] Hi, ...

The Document Foundation Community
Yikes. They set up the foundation in Berlin, Germany? A country well known for its braindead tax laws and bureaucracy, particularly when it comes to NGOs?
There are plenty of non-profit software projects headquartered in Berlin, e.g. KDE since 1997, and they seem to do just fine.

It's stated as conflict of interest, not some bureaucracy.

Things are still vague, due to some legal liability, probably. Sounds to me like for some grants/tenders received by the non-profit were contracted out to Collabora. Which in turn, profits from the base project.

Based on the article:

Some founders/directors kept using money from the foundation to pay their own private companies to get work done.

This is highly irregular: you can’t manage funds that aren’t yours and use those funds to buy from a company which gives you profit.

Legal council warned the of this irregularity, and nothing was made to change the status quo during years.

It's poorly written, perhaps aimed at people already in the loop - would benefit from an AI edit.

As a person who refuses to use “free” cloud products, and won’t even consider Office on Windows, I’m a big fan of LibreOffice. I’ve donated a few times over the years but probably not enough.

I’ll be sad if there’s not a free & local “office” solution available.

That said, my eyes crossed trying to read this. Do I need to ask an LLM to read the various messages and tell me what’s going on? ;-)

I don't know about any of the drama happening, but if LibreOffice ceases to exist, there's still Softmaker FreeOffice as a free & local option. It's nothing fancy, but works for the times when I have to use one. I'm not against cloud products as you are, but it's nice being able to do stuff locally sometimes, it's just more convenient.
If LO ceases to exist, then I will just use plain text typesetting tools.
If LibreOffice ceases to exist, won't the old installers still work? Is it forkable to a new project? I seem to remember that it was Star Office then Open Office then LibreOffice.
I think such situations are rather big risk that a community that already wasn't very active atrophies or splits and then atrophies. With code bases like that there's also a lot of maintenance so being able to run an old version is not necessarily enough.

Before Libre Office was Open Office.

I take comfort that we would not be without a local office suite for long.

I’d love for someone to be able to take it from “yeah it mostly works for me” to “oh fuck you Microsoft, I’m going to move our entire company over to this”.

I’m not going to hold my breath.

because thats not about quality, its about "i demand something thats 100% exactly the same as microsofts product, even in the places where its objectively crappier. I also wish it to track the microslop so that it consistently stays as shitty as microslop deems, so that I may never realize I use something else."
There is still Open Office: https://www.openoffice.org
Apache OpenOffice - Official Site - The Free and Open Productivity Suite

The official home page of the Apache OpenOffice open source project, home of OpenOffice Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw and Base.

Something that is dismaying to me about this situation is that, on one hand, the anti-Collabora arguments are not unconvincing: the situation with Collabora and the foundation seems to have been dubious at best, and I would not be surprised if their legal worries are well-founded.

But on the other, in arguably trying to address the problems, the anti-Collabora side seems to exhibit a distressing lack of honor and decency. The dismissal of voting results that didn't go their way, the malicious misreadings of member votes against their proposals (eg, deciding "If the Board majority group insists on proceeding with this misguided and premature motion, I vote NO" was not a vote against the proposal because the motion was "neither misguided nor premature"), the arguments that complaints about their behavior violate community standards and are are not sufficiently respectful of the work they do, the toxic, patronizing, dismissive statements toward developers and others... even if they are right, I do not understand why they need to behave the way they are behaving.

The earlier threads from the Collabora side were also disappointing in how childish all of their arguments were structured. I read their posts and could barely understand what was being claimed in between all of the sarcasm and attacks, and I wasn't alone in the comments here.

From the outside, this entire situation is obviously very heated. What seems to be missing is some adults in the room who can turn down the tempers, get everyone to take a beat, and then start coming to some reasonable compromises.

Instead it feels like we're seeing the inevitable boiling over of passionate people who couldn't work well together and failed to find ways to cool off and work together.

It's a sad situation to watch.

I'm unclear on the relationship between Collabora and LibreOffice. Some of the earlier stories on this described TDF as ejecting LibreOffice core developers.

My understanding is that Collabora is an online collaborative office suit based on LibreOffice, with commercial support available and managed cloud hosting. It is also available fully open source and supports self-hosting if you don't want their commercial services. Their developers contribute back to LibreOffice.

What I think of when I think of core developers of an office suite are the people developing the word processor itself and the spreadsheet itself and the other core applications.

Did the ejected developers work on those, or did they only work on things built on top of then or other other non-core things? If they were working on the core applications how many non-Collabora people also work on them?

> Did the ejected developers work on those, or did they only work on things built on top of then or other other non-core things?

Yes, they worked on the core. According to Collabora's stats (from their perspective), they contribute more than half of the documented features from the release notes for LibreOffice 26.2 [1].

Collabora's own online version of LibreOffice lies in another repo [2], which presumably contains code specific to their own product built from LibreOffice. They seem to be moving toward a (maybe soft) fork of LibreOffice, while setting up their own Gerrit instance [3].

[1]: https://www.collaboraonline.com/blog/collabora-productivity-...

[2]: https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online

[3]: https://gerrit.collaboraoffice.com/plugins/gitiles/core/