The Document Foundation (TDF), which oversees the development of the LibreOffice office suite, has expelled all Collabora employees and partners. In the last days of March, 43 members (1, 2, 3) were expelled from the TDF, including key LibreOffice developers and co-founders. Seven of the 10 most significant LibreOffice developers were expelled. Of the four founders remaining in the TDF, three are not involved in core code development. In 2025, Collabora employees contributed 45% of all changes to LibreOffice.
Italo Vignoli, one of the founders of the Document Foundation, explained that Collabora members were excluded in accordance with the recently approved new bylaws, which prohibit employees of companies with which legal proceedings are pending. This requirement was introduced because members have historically made decisions in the interests of their employers, not the Document Foundation.
Collabora is said to be investing resources in its own product, which differentiates it from traditional full-featured office suites like LibreOffice. Meanwhile, the Document Foundation strives to act in the interests of the community and focuses on maintaining interest in truly open-source solutions that ensure digital sovereignty and allow users to fully control their infrastructure, applications, and documents.
In the current situation, a series of past poor decisions has led to an issue that poses a significant risk to the project. This issue could cause the Document Foundation to lose its charitable status, which could have unpredictable consequences. Growing donations allows the Document Foundation to become independent from individual companies and hire additional developers. Furthermore, the removal of Collabora employees from the Document Foundation does not mean their removal from the community, and these employees can continue to contribute privately.
Michael Meeks, who works at Collabora, finds the removal of contributors based on collective responsibility and unproven legal concerns unacceptable. Meeks compared the situation to a swamp of aimless political grievances. Among the dissatisfaction points in the Document Foundation's activities are the filling of the governing board with dependent and disengaged staff, the inflated allegations of past conflicts of interest, attempts to compete with the largest contributor, the squandering of donations on trumped-up lawsuits against innocent enthusiasts and former governing board members, tender abuses, and selective claims for the use of the LibreOffice trademark while ignoring clear instances of infringement.
Collabora's plans include the creation of a new, simplified version of the Collabora Office suite, which will be more user-friendly and less feature-heavy than the classic Collabora Office. Simplifying and reducing the codebase by removing redundant components, such as Java support and web and database tools, will accelerate innovation and reduce the number of build configurations.
Collabora also announced the creation of its own change review platform based on Gerrit, which will allow the Document Foundation infrastructure to be freed from new branches and allow for the transition to its own development tools. Collabora will continue to contribute to LibreOffice as needed, but will no longer actively invest in the development of Document Foundation products, for which it has been removed from governance.
The conflict between the Document Foundation and Collabora stems from the development of the cloud edition of LibreOffice Online. In 2020, Collabora created a fork of LibreOffice Online to address branding and marketing issues and continued development in its own repository under the name Collabora Online (this was because the Document Foundation was promoting products from other companies on the LibreOffice Online page, even though those companies contributed little to the development). In 2022, the Document Foundation's board of directors decided to freeze the LibreOffice Online project, as all community developers had switched to the new project and no one was willing to continue maintaining the old repository.
In 2026, the new Document Foundation board of directors reversed the freeze, finding the previous vote to have been conducted under a conflict of interest. The re-creation of the LibreOffice Online repository as a fork of the current Collabora Online repository, along with the rebranding of all Collabora work, was perceived by a Collabora representative as vandalism against the project and a violation of the established status quo, whereby credit was reasonably distributed between the two projects.
Source: opennet.ru
