The Document Foundation ejects its core developers
collaboraonline.com
collaboraonline.com
[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)
Essentially this 100% confirms the Collabora story, just elaborates a bit on how the administrative takeover was done.
Italo and co removed some very dedicated contributors from the TDF. What an absolute disaster.
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).
Say what you mean in plain language; explain the issues and why they matter, and let your readers come to their own conclusions.
https://alternativeto.net/news/2026/4/onlyoffice-ends-its-pa...
I'm no lawyer but I don't think the AGPL says you must use the same branding in a fork, in fact most hard forks tend to prefer changing it in my experience, as the original branding might be trademarked and so they can't legally use it themselves without permission, and/or they just want to distance themselves further from the parent.
Or worse, they'll just think you're a jerk and not feel sorry for you.
There are times to be satirical, don't get me wrong, but those are usually when the dust is settled and maybe a reminiscence on the past.
Have a nice day and I hope that something positive comes out of all of it. I always believe that there are only few projects which get to the eyes of the general public enough to get funded, LibreOffice is one of the very few. People trust Libreoffice with donations and money to fight against Microsoft and show a path of freedom.
For the document foundation to betray the people who programmed the code in the first place, is also, a betrayal of the people who have funded libreoffice for years, who would love to demand more answers and I hope that in the article, that you can talk _effectively_ to them. It's really sad to see all of this happen and I wish if something happens as I don't wish for people to lose hope in open source foundations with cases like these.
It's not at all clear from the article.
All I really got from the article is "collabora are banned from contributing to open office, and aren't happy about it". What reason did they give? What's the actual reason you think it is (you mention things are contrived, so I assume there's another reason you think)? What's the libre office online stuff got to do with it?
All of this is unclear from the article.
What the lawsuit is about would be interesting.
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.
Really? You think the average user cares about this drama?
Most of his blogs are about how awful OOXML (Microsoft Office's open standard) formats are, and that everyone needs to switch to ODF (his preferred open standard).
What people don't want to use is products which don't work with everyone else's. LibreOffice works with Microsoft Office files really well, but for some reason Italo doesn't want you to know that. He wants the entire world to switch formats to LibreOffice's formats, but really that's just telling potential business users LibreOffice can't meet their needs... interacting with the existing monopoly of Microsoft Office users.
This is a self-sabotaging marketing approach. LibreOffice needs to be promoting itself as an excellent drop-in replacement for Microsoft Office which will easily interoperate with every other organization's office applications, regardless of format.
Office supports OpenDocument.l, it just doesn't use it by default.
A far better marketing strategy would be to loudly announce, continually, that LibreOffice is the best software for handling Office files and ODF alike! And as people switch to LibreOffice and it defaults to ODF, that naturally grows.
Meanwhile, LibreOffice's current marketing strategy may succeed in getting governments to offer ODF files and simultaneously sabotage anyone from ever switching to LibreOffice because LibreOffice's own marketing claims it won't work well with Word and Excel files.
No, it doesn't only do that. It also suggests the open xml MS Office format is a mess.*
> This is a conversation I have at work, where people laugh when LibreOffice is mentioned and suggest it's incompatible and we can't consider it.
This is evidence your coworkers are misinformed and you can't correct them. It is not proof that the only thing this blog post does is communicate LibreOffice can't handle Microsoft Office docs.
* this is a tale as old as time, I'm 37, remembering reading about this over and over again on /. when I was a young teen. It was part and parcel with Microsoft's antitrust era. The idea was the open format would help avoid antitrust claims, the complaint was the open format was so byzantine as to be effectively closed.
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.
Regardless of who "wins," I'm just here to say that I like OnlyOffice a lot better and switched away from LibreOffice. I like that it just looks more like a modern program and overall feels less clunky.
It looks like the Euro Office suite will improve upon it when it launches and remove the remaining downsides to it.
https://lwn.net/Articles/833233/
Apparently TDF wanted to host LibreOffice Online for free, when it had previously been a source-only project. Collabora didn't like that as they did 95% of the development and wanted to be able to sell support for their own version, but they didn't want to be competing against TDF's version at the same time.
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.
Office is still a core product, is it not?
They're as unreadable as they're vague.
TDF is ran by a board. The board is supposed to contain 10 people, it currently has 7. This board is expected to be elected by members on a regular schedule. The elections are late, because the rump board has twice delayed the elections. Instead of holding elections to fill out the board, the rump board chose to change the bylaws, through a legally questionable process (properly, they would have to hold a vote of trustees, but chose not to), to allow them to exclude people from voting in the elections. Then they use the new bylaws to exclude many of their political opponents, on very flimsy grounds⁰.
You don't need to even consider which side of this conflict is technical or non-technical to see that there is something rotten here.
0: And yes, the grounds are very flimsy indeed. Excluding people in case of active litigation sounds sensible, until you consider that the litigation was started by the TDF board, and is frivolous. Collabra is using the trademarks under valid license.
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.
when was that, in the 80s?
Not even then...
Looks like there is rebellion in the forums...
I'm sorry, but between the sarcastic blog post and now the forum brigading attempt that we're supposed to believe is "rebellion in the forums" this is all just a very sad response from Collabora. You could have just said that Collabora employees wrote some thank-you notes to each other, not tried to bait Hacker News into checking out a "rebellion in the forum"
I still don't understand the details of what happened because the blog post is too thick with sarcasm and insults, but the way Collabora is handling this makes me reflexively sympathetic to the other side for wanting to get away from a team that behaves like this.
Open-office mitosis is one of the most beautiful and natural parts of the Open Source ecosystem.
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
> The Community Bylaws require that employees of companies involved in legal disputes with The Document Foundation be removed from TDF membership because, in the past, people made decisions in the interest of their employers rather than in the interest of The Document Foundation.
and
> The Document Foundation could have lost its charitable status, which would have had unforeseen consequences.
I'm not sure why they would have lost charitable status, but that seems like a legitimate concern.
Comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47604892 (in particular, the mention that Collabora was not in fact intending to leave) lend further credence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Meeks_(software_develo...
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 guess the question is does the size of the organization match the scale of what they want to accomplish?
Or do you mean scale of organization?
That’s nearly the exact opposite of welcoming newbies.
To be perfectly honest, that’s fine: OpenBSD demands a steep learning curve and that you know what you’re doing.
They point to documentation in response to the kind of request I've seen closed with RTFMs elsewhere. They'll expect one to read it, and try one's hand at whatever one is trying to accomplish — and they'll feel slighted by a refusal, given how much work they put into it.
And yet, they go to great, unexpected (given the fame) lengths to help someone actually making the effort; they don't try to put anyone down in order to feel bigger than they are, but they don't sugar coat things to appear more likable either.
In short, no, knowing what one is doing isn't a prerequisite; it's more about not foisting onto others the responsibility for the effort required to move from where one is to where one wants to be — whether in knowledge, maturity or tools.
Why do you believe pointing to the manual is newbie friendly?
In the Linux world, it took ages before it was newbie friendly (thinking Ubuntu and Mint).
OpenBSD serves an important niche, but to brand it as newbie-friendly does OpenBSD a disservice.
Or perhaps you mean newbie tolerant?
In this context, what I expanded above as foisting onto others the responsibility for the effort required by what we want to accomplish.
> Why do you believe pointing to the manual is newbie friendly?
To the documentation, which may or may not be a manpage; as it's usually done in response to a request for the information contained therein, I do find it reasonable.
> OpenBSD serves an important niche, but to brand it as newbie-friendly does OpenBSD a disservice.
We're discussing OpenBSD's community, not the system itself.
> Or perhaps you mean newbie tolerant?
I meant what I wrote, that I find the community to be the opposite of "notoriously terrible and unwelcoming to newbies," by which I do not imply newbie-friendliness in a kindergarten sense.
The community makes the system and decides what’s tolerable. That is to say, the community decides the type of users it expects to serve.
When your own example of laziness is to provide a script and someone fails to run a script; you’re comparing to a time when RTFM was the Linux norm. But those days where RTFM to newbies were tolerable are long gone.
So OpenBSD was the friendlier community then; it’s a niche and insular community today.
So while I agree it’s not a terrible community, I also wouldn’t say it’s inviting.
> I meant what I wrote, that I find the community to be the opposite of "notoriously terrible and unwelcoming to newbies," by which I do not imply newbie-friendliness in a kindergarten sense.
I mean, it’s not inviting to newbies either; which is the plain reading and understanding of “opposite” of what the OP stated.
Instead it’s “tolerant”, a term which for some reason you don’t seem to like.
I’d ask if you’re Theo, mainly due to the strange back and forth we’re having over semantics and a concern over the OpenBSD community reputation.
Sure, but the community isn't the system; it may inform the direction the system will take, but there isn't a 1:1 equivalence between their respective qualities at any point and across different levels. I made a statement about the OpenBSD community, you implied I was doing a disservice in making such statement about OpenBSD, so I pointed out the distinction.
> When your own example of laziness is to provide a script
We seem to be having different conversations. How did you get "provide a script and someone fails run a script" from "foisting onto others the responsibility for the effort required by what we want to accomplish"?
> So while I agree it’s not a terrible community, I also wouldn’t say it’s inviting.
So... We're mostly on the same page? I opposed someone's claim that it was "notoriously terrible and unwelcoming to newbies." I disagree on both counts. I didn't claim it to be inviting, however, which I find distinct from welcoming: I perceive the former as indicative of an active effort or the desire to attract new members or of is being perceive as attractive from the outside.
> I mean, it’s not inviting to newbies either; which is the plain reading and understanding of “opposite” of what the OP stated.
It's a community that can help a newbie grow in different ways; to increase in knowledge and refine the craft; to be demanding on oneself and to take criticism; so, I find it the opposite of "notoriously terrible."
It accepts anyone interested in learning and willing to make the effort to learn. The community cares about OpenBSD; someone likewise interested in OpenBSD won't be turned always due to politics. So, yes, I find it welcoming.
Is it for everyone? What is? The barbecue club may be the most welcoming place on earth without its being the best fit for a vegetarian.
> Instead it’s “tolerant”, a term which for some reason you don’t seem to like.
I don't see how my preferring my own choice of words over a proposed alternative is indicate of my having something against the latter.
You may want to consider how often, and specially how seriously, you engage with different viewpoints if your first reaction to what looks like is to suppose a mistake and the second is to assume a personal limitation.
> I’d ask if you’re Theo mainly due to the strange back and forth we’re having over semantics and a concern over the OpenBSD community reputation.
Someone commented. I disagreed. You disagreed — on semantics. I expanded. You pushed. And so on. I'm not seeing any of this as some battle for a community's reputation. It's just a discussion.
Not sure if you want to count it as a "code of conduct", but it certainly defines rules on how to communicate and contribute to the project.
> ... fine without a code of conduct — in the sense bakugo employed "code of conduct," not in the generalized sense ...
This part of your comment was worthwhile. You should have stopped there, before starting to grind an unrelated political axe. Let's at least try to follow the "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity." guideline, eh?
I'm not sure exactly what is meant by that. My guess, having some experience with board-sitter parasites, is they're just appealing to empty principles to create the illusion of being important to the organization, because they're unable or unwilling to make more tangible and substantial contributions.
When somebody can't justify their role with the quality of their work, they look for other justifications instead. Ideological justifications work best because they aren't provable and anybody who questions the value of the supposed ideological contributions can simply be dismissed as being ideologically opposed (see: the sibling comment accusing you of ideological alignment with gamergate, even though libreoffice has nothing to do with gaming.)
For instance, suppose I am a useless parasite who decides to embed myself into the local school board; I have nothing of real value to contribute to such an organization, but maybe I want the role for the clout. Instead of doing something real, I could instead say that my role on the board is to advance the cause of equality. Anybody who says I'm useless can be construed as opposing equality. Anybody who tried to measure the actual equality in the org before and after my arrival can be dismissed because measuring equality is hard to do objectively.
(I learned most of this from a few relatives of mine, who are such board-seeking parasites. By the way, parasite board sitters can use opposition to "woke" in the way they use championing the cause of equality; both cynical empty words used to distract people from the lack of real, substantial and demonstrable contributions. Anybody who complains can be accused of being woke. It works exactly the same regardless of what flavor of disguise the parasite chooses.)
Up until the 2024 board election, the organization ran on meritocracy in the sense that those who contributed the most had the most say.
Equality means here that the organization shifted to everyone present having an equal voice. It was no longer proportional to the work contributed.
StarOffice was a German office suite bought by Sun Microsystems in 1999. Sun open-sourced it in 2000 as OpenOffice.org, which became the major free alternative to Microsoft Office through the 2000s. Sun kept significant control. They owned the trademark, required copyright assignment for contributions, and steered the project's direction. Many community contributors were uneasy with this arrangement but tolerated it because Sun was broadly seen as a good-faith actor.
Oracle acquired Sun in 2010. Oracle had a reputation for being far more aggressive about monetizing and controlling its acquisitions (the Java/Google lawsuit being another example). The OpenOffice.org community had already been frustrated by years of slow decision-making and corporate gatekeeping, and Oracle's arrival made the situation feel untenable.
A group of prominent community members and corporate contributors (including people from Red Hat, Novell/SUSE, Canonical, and Google) announced The Document Foundation in Sep 2010 and forked the codebase as LibreOffice. Oracle eventually donated the OpenOffice.org code to Apache but LibreOffice quickly became the version that mattered.
The reason they had to fork was that a single entity (first Sun, then Oracle) had unchecked power over the project. The Document Foundation was explicitly designed to prevent that. If there's no formal structure, whoever controls the servers, the domain name, the trademark, or the build infrastructure effectively controls the project. A foundation with bylaws, elected leadership, and distributed authority makes it much harder for any single company or individual to take the project hostage.
LibreOffice receives donations, employs some staff, holds trademarks, pays for infrastructure, and sponsors events. Under German law (TDF is registered in Berlin), you need a proper legal entity with accountable governance to do this. You can't just have "some developers" holding a bank account and a trademark informally. The foundation was officially incorporated on February 17, 2012.
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.
> 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.)
i had to re-read the original sentence several times to figure out how you came to that conclusion but can see it now: "all people over/above/beyond [a limit of] 30..."
> their Membership Committee has decided to eject from membership all Collabora staff and partners (over thirty people) who...
I don't know if that's correct, either.
A different drama
Kids, that's a perfect example of institutionalized passive-aggressive behavior.
It's like they're setting themselves up for a "no true Scotsman" argument. Anybody who disagrees with their decisions isn't a "true believer" in open source.
In similar behavior, one of the votes against the community bylaws that seem to have resulted resulted in the expulsions was "If the Board majority group insists on proceeding with this misguided and premature motion, I vote NO". Those in favor decided that the vote was conditional and not valid, because "this motion is neither misguided nor premature". They then proceeded to tell others complaining about the decision that they were violating community standards in doing so.
As far as I can tell, the invalidated vote made no difference to the outcome; it is difficult for me see a legitimate motivation for the interpretation of the vote.
Follow on that with the removals from the members list (which as near as I can gather is removing eligible voters from the delayed but mandated upcoming BoD elections). And looking through some of the other recent discussion, if the TDF majority group was hoping to come out of this looking like they're on the side of angels, they might want to get a refund on those tarnished halos.
[1]: https://community.documentfoundation.org/t/sorry-but-i-give-...
[2]: https://community.documentfoundation.org/t/vote-adopt-versio...
Not only our representation of the world is wrong, but world evolves possibly faster than cognitive abilities can keep track of without the minimum effort which is driving out of comfort zone.
So why not just fork it under a new name.
Again? Sigh. Isn't that how we got LibreOffice in the first place? (From OpenOffice.)
Since Collabora already has an online version, maybe they should fork completely and call this offline version something that implies independence. So, I suggest: SolOffice. Haha.
It was really a terrible name if you're going after normie office workers. Nobody outside of open source people knows what "Libre" means or even how to pronounce it.
I also checked Google Trends for the last 3 months, comparing LibreOffice vs OpenOffice. The first is searched on average 4.7 times more than the latter, which tracks with weekly download numbers.
From those numbers, I'd say it's pretty clear the name "LibreOffice" won quite decisively over "OpenOffice". OpenOffice is still used a lot, but nowhere close to LibreOffice, especially when we add Linux distributions counts.
OpenOffice is by far the better name and has a potential brand recognition that LibreOffice never will.
It has been a while since I've noticed a high-profile OSS schism; for anyone who isn't used to them, this is how communities behave. They're generally healthy as long as the stakes aren't too high. In a lighter moment, I might also call on TDF to expel any vim users too in the hope that they'll take the hint and switch to a more C-x aligned editor.
(Pun explainer: silent s, so it sounds like the cycling event. Meaning Towers of France - tour means both tower and tour[en] in French, only their grammatical gender is different)