Let me tell you something about open source foundations: they always, ALWAYS, eat the people who actually build the thing they’re supposed to steward. Every single time. You’d think they’d learn. You’d think someone at The Document Foundation would look at the Oracle/OpenOffice case study and go “hmm, maybe don’t alienate the people writing 80% of our code.” But no. They’re not that smart.

On April 1, 2026—because of course it was April Fool’s Day, because the universe has a sick sense of humor—TDF’s Membership Committee ejected every Collabora employee from membership. Thirty-four people. Seven of the top ten all-time committers. People who’ve been maintaining this codebase for over a decade. Gone. Just like that.

Michael Meeks—CEO of Collabora, one of the original founders of LibreOffice, the guy who was literally there when this project broke off from OpenOffice—got kicked out. Along with Thorsten Behrens, Jan Holesovsky, René Engelhard, Caolan McNamara, and the rest of the crew. People whose names are literally in the commit history more than anyone else’s in the entire project.

And why? What was the crime? What unforgivable sin did these people commit?

“Legal disputes,” apparently. The TDF board cited some newly adopted Community Bylaws that bar contributions from employees of companies “involved in legal disputes” with the foundation. That’s it. That’s the whole explanation. No specific allegations. No details. Just “legal disputes” and a bylaw passed quietly enough that nobody noticed until the guillotine dropped.

The Numbers Don’t Lie And They Look Terrible For TDF

Let’s talk about what Collabora actually contributes to this project, since TDF seems to have forgotten:

  • 45% of all commits in 2025 came from Collabora and allotropia (their recently acquired subsidiary). That’s nearly half the entire codebase.
  • They contribute 80% of the commits when you look at active development, not historical totals.
  • They maintain the enterprise product (Collabora Online) that actual organizations pay for.
  • They do crash-testing, security maintenance, interoperability work—the unglamorous stuff that keeps a project from imploding.

And TDF just said “get out.”

This is the equivalent of a restaurant firing its entire kitchen staff because the owner got into a contract dispute with one of the chefs. The food will still look exactly the same on the menu. It’ll just never arrive at the table.

The Irony Is Almost Too Perfect

LibreOffice exists because Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems in 2010, took over OpenOffice, and promptly told the community to go screw themselves. The community forked. They created The Document Foundation. They built LibreOffice from the ashes of what Oracle abandoned.

Now—sixteen years later—TDF is doing EXACTLY what Oracle did. They’re pushing out the community contributors. They’re prioritizing governance purity over practical survival. They’re creating the conditions for a fork, exactly as Oracle did, exactly as every single open source project that forgets its roots eventually does.

Michael Meeks put it perfectly: “We seem to be back where we were fifteen years ago.”

That’s not an exaggeration. That’s not hyperbole. That’s literally what’s happening. The same story, different villain.

What’s Actually Happening Now

Collabora isn’t taking this sitting down. Of course they’re not. They’re announcing their own Gerrit instance, their own fork, their own “differentiated Collabora Office” product that’s going to be “smoother, more user friendly, and less feature dense.” They’re pulling their distro branches out of TDF’s infrastructure. They’re building their own thing.

The Hacker News thread about this is already calling it: “fork has happened” and “the new fork will be the living one.” The developers will follow the code, not the foundation. They always do.

And here’s the real kicker for TDF: they’ve now got maybe a dozen people left who can actually maintain this codebase, and most of them are paid staff, not volunteers. The volunteer community that made LibreOffice viable? That’s gone. They just removed it.

This Is What Governance Capture Looks Like

Here’s what’s happening at TDF, if you strip away the polite language about “bylaws” and “legal disputes”: a foundation that was created to protect open source from corporate capture has itself become captured. The board is making decisions in a closed loop. They’re passing bylaws without meaningful community input. They’re picking fights with the people who make their project possible, and they’re doing it in a way that lets them claim plausible deniability.

Collabora’s response called out specific problems: delayed elections, changed bylaws without proper votes, spending that doesn’t match stated priorities, governance that operates more like a “staff-controlled collective” than a free software foundation.

When one side provides receipts and the other provides platitudes, it’s not hard to figure out who’s being honest.

The Bigger Picture

Germany just mandated ODF as the standard for government documents. Multiple European countries are betting big on LibreOffice as part of their “digital sovereignty” initiatives. The project was about to get huge institutional adoption, legitimate funding streams, a chance to actually compete with Microsoft 365 at scale.

And now that’s all in question. Not because of technical failures. Not because of market forces. But because TDF decided that purity was more important than practicality. They looked at the company writing most of their code and said “we’d rather be right than functional.”

This is the fork that didn’t need to happen. The project was winning. The timing couldn’t be worse. And the only people who benefit are Microsoft and Google, who will happily watch two open source office suites destroy each other while they keep selling subscriptions.

What You Should Take Away

If you’re maintainer of any open source project: watch this closely. This is what happens when foundations forget they’re supposed to serve the project, not the other way around. Governance that drives away contributors isn’t governance—it’s gatekeeping with extra steps.

And if you’re at a company considering supporting an open source foundation with your development time: maybe think twice about giving your best people to an organization that can eject them on a board’s whim. The license lets you fork. The governance doesn’t have to own you.

LibreOffice is about to become two projects. The one that survives will be the one where the developers actually are.

And TDF just told them where the door was.