I do not know enough about this particular drama to have any opinion on the merits of the sides involved. However, I cannot help but notice the parallels with the infancy of TDF and the separation of LibreOffice from OpenOffice.org. In 2010, Oracle demanded the resignation of every TDF member from the OOo Community Council that was nominally its governance board; this constituted the removal of every community member (ie, non Oracle employee) from the council [1]; I don't know the full details of what happened after the meeting [2], but it seems like the TDF members refused to resign and that they were removed. The justification was quite similar to the justification here [3]: that the TDF members had a conflict of interest by virtue of being TDF members, and that they could continue to be involved if they left TDF.
- LibreOfficeOnLine (LOOL) was created within The Document Foundation (TDF) but largely developed by Collabora. It was source only and suggested users pay a company to host for them.
- Some within TDF wanted to offer LOOL as a binary offering.
- Collabora moved their contributions to Collabora Online, which they controlled.
- LOOL was archived.
- More recently, LOOL was revived
- Collabora is pissed
- Collabora gets booted from TDF
I suppose this is a fundamental issue with the model of a foundation "owning" a product but a separate for profit company doing all the work. There's always going to be some issue that the two sides disagree on (in this case, how the free version is distributed). The foundation then either has to give in*, and become irrelevant or stand up for their own position, in which case the company is basically forced to pull out their co-operation. It seems unlikely that TDF will be able to make any product progress, and I bet in a few years collabora gets what they want and returns to the fold. TDF will either be cowed forever or this situation will just repeat on the next conflict.
* Like with OpenAI, where the for-benefit part eventually capitulated and became an vestigial organ of a for-profit business.
So what were the contrived reasons? I navigated getting coolwsd built before, but never quite got my user management layer for Nextcloud perfected to the point of going live... I thought it was a good piece of kit, but was a little bit skeptical of the branding divergence at the time. Something about it kinda just felt like drama waiting to happen. Was that it do you think? Or something else. Will keep an eye on the project regardless.
Not from the board, (implies board of directors), but from TDF membership (board of trustees). This essentially means you have no voting power and no benefits, but you're still free to still contribute by fixing bugs, adding new features, mentoring, code review,... ("community"). This are all the things that would benefit TDF by getting more money from donations (and then use that money for useful things that are mentioned in this TDF blog post).
I read it, and was hoping I would be more sympathetic to their side, but it was essentially 'they violated the rules our newly added non-contributor board members set, and by those rules, we kicked them out'.
Essentially this 100% confirms the Collabora story, just elaborates a bit on how the administrative takeover was done.
I wish we would admit that you can't have it all. You can't have a product that is open source with neutral foundation governance and also have that same product be de facto proprietary. People have been pushing this bait-and-switch business model for too long.
The company in question profits heavily from the open source nature of LibreOffice. They're a big government vendor in Europe, mainly because their codebase is perceived as open source.
Pro tip: If you're trying to raise awareness of an issue that's important to you, don't lard up your exposition with sarcasm, insider references and incomprehensible innuendo. If all you manage to communicate is that you're unhappy, people may feel sorry for you but they won't know why.
Say what you mean in plain language; explain the issues and why they matter, and let your readers come to their own conclusions.
How about a different take: This isn't really about two open source organizations fighting. It's a psyop from the powers that want to stop the digital sovereignty initiatives going on around the world by amplifying some friction that already existed. People won't want to use products with so much drama and uncertainty.
TDF needs to eject the members who pulled the strings hardest on this - they are plants.
Damn I didn't know I had that much of a tinfoil hat.
As an outsider it's pretty opaque to me. I think the Document Foundation (handling LibreOffice) wanted to (re)release an online office suite that seems to compete with Collabora, which sells one. But the biggest contributors to LibreOffice are Collabora employees. I thought maybe they feared Collabora taking over the org, but it looks like there are formal legal disputes between the two, I think (see the post from the LibreOffice side https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/04/01/comment-...).
And of course when legal issues are involved everyone is being very vague. I just hope it doesn't hurt LibreOffice's development too badly.
As somebody else pointed out, I read the entire article and still can't figure out what the author is actually talking about. That said, this sounds an awful lot like the reddit moderator problem: when you rely on unpaid volunteers, they become activist crusaders.
> There are many great ways to contribute to FLOSS projects and coding is only one of them - let me underline that.
I've seen this a lot and really disagree. Maybe writing books or evangelism is useful, but those are still technical. These foundation boards and groups get filled up with people padding their career resume and make detrimental choices to oss. They want to get "Board member of X foundation" so they can try to get a corpo board seat.
I was interested in this but the sarcastic and advertorial tone stopped me from getting to the end. It sounds like it describes a real problem but as someone who has not been following the issue it's impossible to separate the facts from the fulmination. I can't tell if something has gone badly wrong with the LibreOffice project or the writer is insinuating as such to promote their own.
So, basically, TDF doesn’t want Collabora (a company) people on their board. The technical vs non-technical framing seems contrived at best. The excuse by TDF seems… suspicious.
On the one hand a foundation led by non-developers is bad.
On the other hand, a foundation captured by a single company and prevented on working on anything that the company works on for profit is also bad.
And finally, a 'personal blog' from someone who is actually senior at a company is a very weird back-hand submission. If the comments weren't defendable to put on the company blog, they probably aren't needed here either.
What are the plausible motivations for the TDF board members here? Do they pay themselves with org funds, or is it just a fight for turf and clout? I think identifying factors like this might be helpful, because if these factors could be eliminated or reduced it might save future orgs from infestations of the sort of people who seek out boards to sit on, as they'd find a better opportunity for parasitism in some other org.
I'm sure there's a reason for the blog post, and the dude name checks himself so I'm sure he's important. But i have no idea what he's on about other than he's mad.
Why do these open source foundations (like Mozilla) have direct products anyway? Why not a certification? Who should the users be and why? Who are the collaborators and competitors? These are hard questions.
At least with free software licenses we can separate the copyrights from the trademarks, and exercise the right to fork if a trademark owner is captured and misbehaves.
Why does an open source project, apparently developed by a handful of core developers, have a "board", a "membership committee", "elections" etc? And why do these include people who do not contribute directly to development at all?
Let me guess, these same people also pushed to introduce a "code of conduct" to the project?
This is yet another negative article with LiberOffice/TDF at the centre of it (this time with Collabora freely dragging themselves into the muck). This after attacks on OnlyOffice and OpenOffice for, from a relatively external perspective, "existing as competition".
I appreciate that for those "in the trenches" this may be a rallying cry or a shot across the bow, but for the rest of us it is indicating that we keep the whole thing - LibreOffice and Collabora - at arms length. Which is a shame because I've recommended both to people in the past, as well as happily using both at various points myself.
(Downvoted for asking for legitimate clarification? Seriously? Age discrimination _is_ a real thing, so there's no way of knowing, for lack of a comma, which interpretation was intended.)
> The project welcomes contributions from true believers in open source. As the majority of people at Collabora are such believers, we expect them to continue contributing when the time comes.
Kids, that's a perfect example of institutionalized passive-aggressive behavior.
177 comments
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/10/oracle-want... [2]: https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Community_Council_Log_20101... [3]: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/04/01/comment-...
- LibreOfficeOnLine (LOOL) was created within The Document Foundation (TDF) but largely developed by Collabora. It was source only and suggested users pay a company to host for them.
- Some within TDF wanted to offer LOOL as a binary offering.
- Collabora moved their contributions to Collabora Online, which they controlled.
- LOOL was archived.
- More recently, LOOL was revived
- Collabora is pissed
- Collabora gets booted from TDF
I suppose this is a fundamental issue with the model of a foundation "owning" a product but a separate for profit company doing all the work. There's always going to be some issue that the two sides disagree on (in this case, how the free version is distributed). The foundation then either has to give in*, and become irrelevant or stand up for their own position, in which case the company is basically forced to pull out their co-operation. It seems unlikely that TDF will be able to make any product progress, and I bet in a few years collabora gets what they want and returns to the fold. TDF will either be cowed forever or this situation will just repeat on the next conflict.
* Like with OpenAI, where the for-benefit part eventually capitulated and became an vestigial organ of a for-profit business.
> [REDACTED: 43 lines of discussion about the current legal situation]
https://community.documentfoundation.org/t/board-of-director...
edit: And lots of back and forth regarding reviving LibreOffice Online here: https://community.documentfoundation.org/t/vote-revoke-votes...
Seems messy
It was only when TDF contrived reasons to expel Collabora people that Collabora decided to leave.
(Full Disclosure: I am one of the Collabora people expelled)
https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/04/01/comment-...
Not from the board, (implies board of directors), but from TDF membership (board of trustees). This essentially means you have no voting power and no benefits, but you're still free to still contribute by fixing bugs, adding new features, mentoring, code review,... ("community"). This are all the things that would benefit TDF by getting more money from donations (and then use that money for useful things that are mentioned in this TDF blog post).
Essentially this 100% confirms the Collabora story, just elaborates a bit on how the administrative takeover was done.
Say what you mean in plain language; explain the issues and why they matter, and let your readers come to their own conclusions.
TDF needs to eject the members who pulled the strings hardest on this - they are plants.
Damn I didn't know I had that much of a tinfoil hat.
As an outsider it's pretty opaque to me. I think the Document Foundation (handling LibreOffice) wanted to (re)release an online office suite that seems to compete with Collabora, which sells one. But the biggest contributors to LibreOffice are Collabora employees. I thought maybe they feared Collabora taking over the org, but it looks like there are formal legal disputes between the two, I think (see the post from the LibreOffice side https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/04/01/comment-...).
And of course when legal issues are involved everyone is being very vague. I just hope it doesn't hurt LibreOffice's development too badly.
> There are many great ways to contribute to FLOSS projects and coding is only one of them - let me underline that.
I've seen this a lot and really disagree. Maybe writing books or evangelism is useful, but those are still technical. These foundation boards and groups get filled up with people padding their career resume and make detrimental choices to oss. They want to get "Board member of X foundation" so they can try to get a corpo board seat.
On the other hand, a foundation captured by a single company and prevented on working on anything that the company works on for profit is also bad.
And finally, a 'personal blog' from someone who is actually senior at a company is a very weird back-hand submission. If the comments weren't defendable to put on the company blog, they probably aren't needed here either.
On a different note, this industry used to have so much more fun - just solving puzzles to herd bits - before it was flooded by politics.
Looks like there is rebellion in the forums...
Open-office mitosis is one of the most beautiful and natural parts of the Open Source ecosystem.
https://www.documentfoundation.org/board/
https://www.collaboraonline.com/about-us/
More on the funds issue in German article https://forum.linuxguides.de/core/index.php?article/54-libre... entered at https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=47718765
https://www.collaboraonline.com/torf-index/
At least with free software licenses we can separate the copyrights from the trademarks, and exercise the right to fork if a trademark owner is captured and misbehaves.
Let me guess, these same people also pushed to introduce a "code of conduct" to the project?
I appreciate that for those "in the trenches" this may be a rallying cry or a shot across the bow, but for the rest of us it is indicating that we keep the whole thing - LibreOffice and Collabora - at arms length. Which is a shame because I've recommended both to people in the past, as well as happily using both at various points myself.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47601168
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47605831
> their Membership Committee has decided to eject from membership all Collabora staff and partners over thirty people who ...
Is it:
1) "eject from membership all Collabora staff and partners, over thirty people ..."
2) "eject from membership all Collabora staff and partners over thirty, people who ..."
:-?
Edit: that's from the article this post leads to: <https://www.collaboraonline.com/blog/tdf-ejects-its-core-dev...>
(Downvoted for asking for legitimate clarification? Seriously? Age discrimination _is_ a real thing, so there's no way of knowing, for lack of a comma, which interpretation was intended.)
> The project welcomes contributions from true believers in open source. As the majority of people at Collabora are such believers, we expect them to continue contributing when the time comes.
Kids, that's a perfect example of institutionalized passive-aggressive behavior.