The Document Foundation expelled over 30 LibreOffice core developers from membership this week—including seven of the project’s top 10 all-time committers. The ejected developers, all employed by Collabora Productivity, contribute approximately 80% of LibreOffice’s codebase. TDF cited vague “legal disputes” and conflict-of-interest bylaws but provided no specifics. Collabora responded by announcing plans to fork the project.
Here’s the kicker: LibreOffice was born from this exact scenario. When Oracle acquired OpenOffice in 2010 and pushed community members out of governance, developers forked to create LibreOffice and TDF. Sixteen years later, TDF is doing precisely what Oracle did—ejecting the people who actually build the software. As one Hacker News commenter put it, “LibreOffice’s own foundation now mirrors Oracle’s exclusionary tactics.”
You Can’t Eject 80% of Your Developers
Let’s be clear about the numbers. Collabora and allotropia (both affected by the ejections) contribute roughly 80% of all commits to LibreOffice. Among the expelled: Michael Meeks, Collabora’s CEO and a LibreOffice founder. Thorsten Behrens, Jan Holesovsky, René Engelhard, Caolan McNamara—seven of the top 10 contributors, gone.
TDF’s justification? Community bylaws require removing employees of companies “involved in legal disputes” with the foundation. The problem: TDF won’t specify what these legal disputes actually are. Their official response mentions “a series of wrong decisions in the past” and vaguely warns about losing charitable status, but offers zero concrete details. When you’re this evasive, you’re either hiding something or you know your reasoning won’t hold up to scrutiny.
You can have all the bylaws you want, but you can’t run a software project without the people who write the code. This is organizational suicide dressed up as governance.
European Governments Bet Big on LibreOffice—TDF Just Made That Risky
This isn’t just tech drama. Moreover, LibreOffice is critical infrastructure for European digital sovereignty. Germany’s Schleswig-Holstein deployed LibreOffice to 30,000 public workers in 2024, with 30,000 teachers next in line. Denmark’s Ministry of Digital Affairs is transitioning from Microsoft Office. Italy runs LibreOffice on over 100,000 government systems. France and Spain have similar deployments.
These governments invested millions to escape vendor lock-in with Microsoft. Schleswig-Holstein alone expects to save €15 million in 2026 by ditching Microsoft 365 licenses. Now TDF has introduced a different kind of risk: project instability and potential fragmentation. Consequently, when the fork happens—and it will—governments will have to choose between TDF’s version and Collabora’s. That’s exactly the kind of uncertainty that makes CIOs revert to “nobody gets fired for buying Microsoft.”
The Governance Dilemma: Democracy Without Meritocracy
TDF claims conflict of interest, but Collabora alleges something more troubling: governance capture. According to Collabora’s statement, TDF has been stacking the board with “non-technical, affiliated staff” while sidelining technical contributors. Furthermore, TDF restarted development of LibreOffice Online—a product that competes directly with Collabora’s commercial offering. So the foundation is competing with its biggest contributor while using that contributor’s code.
This exposes the fundamental paradox of open source foundations. Foundations exist to prevent corporate control, but who actually builds the software? Corporate-funded developers. TDF chose ideological purity over project survival. You can have democratic governance, but when non-technical board members outvote the people who write 80% of the code, you don’t have a functioning meritocracy—you have a path to irrelevance.
Collabora offered specifics in their allegations: delayed elections, changed bylaws without proper votes, spending donor money on lawsuits against ex-board members, failing to pay contractors. However, TDF’s response? Vague handwaving about charitable status and past problems. When one side provides receipts and the other offers platitudes, it’s not hard to figure out who’s being straight.
The Fork Is Inevitable—And TDF Handed Over the Project
Collabora isn’t waiting around. They’ve already announced plans to launch their own Gerrit instance and build a “differentiated Collabora Office” with a web-based toolkit and cleaner codebase. The Hacker News community sees what’s coming: “fork has happened,” one commenter noted. Another predicted, “the new fork will be the living one.”
They’re right. When you eject the developers, they don’t disappear—they take their expertise elsewhere. Collabora has the talent, infrastructure, and commercial motivation to maintain a thriving fork. What does TDF have? A democratic process and a codebase they can’t maintain without the people they just expelled. In fact, developers will follow the work. Users will follow the developers. Governments will follow stability.
TDF’s best-case scenario is slow decline as development slows and quality degrades. Worst case? Rapid exodus to the Collabora fork, leaving LibreOffice as a legacy project maintained by volunteers who can’t keep pace with Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. Either way, TDF chose purity over pragmatism and now has neither.
What This Means for Open Source Governance
This conflict isn’t unique to LibreOffice. Every foundation-governed project faces the same tension: how do you balance corporate contributions with community independence? Therefore, TDF’s answer—eject corporate contributors when they become inconvenient—doesn’t work. Oracle tried it with OpenOffice. Now TDF tried it with LibreOffice. Both times, the result is a fork and a weakened ecosystem.
The smarter approach? Transparent conflict-of-interest policies with specific, enforceable criteria. Clear governance that respects both democratic values and technical merit. Bylaws that distinguish between corporate control and corporate contribution. And maybe—just maybe—don’t compete directly with the company that writes 80% of your code while claiming they’re the ones with the conflict of interest.
TDF had 16 years to get this right. Instead, they became the very thing they were created to escape. Congratulations, you’re now Oracle.
