The Document Foundation just pulled the sameshit they were founded to prevent. Again. For the third goddamn time.
Let me lay out what happened, because if you’ve seen one open-source governance collapse, you’ve seen them all — except somehow this one manages to be even more depressing than the last.
The Setup: We Forked From Corporate Overlords Because Community Is Pure
Back in 2010, a bunch of OpenOffice developers got tired of Oracle being Oracle. You remember Oracle — the company that acquired Sun and then apparently decided that open-source community contributors were just liabilities to be managed into nonexistence. So they forked. Created The Document Foundation. Called it LibreOffice. Made it perfectly clear: this is NOT a corporation. This is a meritocracy. This is BY THE COMMUNITY, FOR THE COMMUNITY, and would NEVER become the thing it fled from.
And for a while, it worked! Look at us! We made something! We’re different!
Cut to 2026. The Document Foundation just ejected 30+ developers from Collabora — the company that built approximately 95% of LibreOffice Online, the cloud version that actual enterprises use. Including seven of the top ten core committers of all time. Gone. Just like that. Not for code quality issues. Not for behavioral problems. Because there’s a LAWSUIT pending between TDF and Collabora, and someone’s new bright idea was that having company employees as voting members during an active legal dispute creates a “conflict of interest.”
I’m sorry, let me make sure I have this straight: the foundation that exists ONLY because volunteers and company developers built it from nothing is now purity-purging the company developers because they MIGHT vote the wrong way in a legal dispute?
The Contradictions Are Stacking Up Like bodies in a Dostoyevsky Novel
Here’s what makes this so beautifully infuriating:
- The original founders? Gone. Jan Holesovsky, Thorsten Behrens, Rene Engelhard, Caolan McNamara, Michael Meeks, Cor Nouws, Italo Vignoli — all out. Most of them have been gone for years.
- The current TDF board? Mostly non-technical staff now. Not developers. Not contributors. Administrators.
- The lawsuit? It’s about the online code — Collabora wrote 95% of it, then TDF wanted to compete with them by offering a free hosted version, so Collabora took their code and made their own product. Classic commercial dispute. The kind that happens in EVERY SINGLE commercial open-source fork in history.
- The bylaw that ejected everyone? Passed in late 2025. Specifically designed to remove Collabora employees. It specifically required anyone “affiliated with a company in an active legal dispute with TDF” to step down from membership.
This is the foundation that PRETENDED to be different from Oracle. The foundation that said “we’ll never be like them.” Now passing bylaws to strip voting rights from the people who wrote the code because those people work for a company that’s suing them.
The cognitive dissonance is so thick you could spread it on toast.
Every Great Open-Source Project Eventually Eats Its Contributors
This isn’t even the first time LibreOffice has done this exact dance. It’s literally the THIRD time.
Cycle 1: OpenOffice fork from Oracle → LibreOffice Oracle acquired Sun, started treating OpenOffice contributors like liability. The community said “no, we’re better than this” and forked. Created The Document Foundation. Perfect. We showed them.
Cycle 2: LibreOffice Online drama → Collabora Online Collabora built 95% of the online code, but TDF decided they wanted to offer it for free, compete with their biggest commercial contributor. Collabora said “fine, we’ll take our code and make our own product.” TDF archived the original online code. Then recently UNARCHIVED it for reasons that make no sense to anyone. Everyone’s confused. Everyone’s angry. This is where we are now.
Cycle 3: Today’s ejection TDF’s response to the legal dispute is to pass a bylaw specifically designed to remove their biggest contributor’s employees from governance. This is the foundation equivalent of “I don’t like that you’re suing me, so I’m taking away your voting privileges.”
At this point, I’m genuinely impressed by the consistency. The Document Foundation has now done the exact SAME THREE ACTS as Oracle did 16 years ago:
- Acquire/accept major code contributions from company developers
- Start competing with those companies commercially
- When the companies push back, strip their governance rights and declare victory
They are literally becoming the thing they forked to escape from. And they appear to have absolutely no self-awareness about it.
But Wait, There’s More
From Collabora’s CEO Michael Meeks’ post:
“Meanwhile TDF continues to hire developers, sells LibreOffice and starts to act more like a staff-controlled collective than a Free Software project.”
This is the part that really gets me. The founding principle was “community comes first.” The staff is supposed to SERVE the community. Now there are more non-contributing staff on the board than actual active developers. The organization is being run BY the staff, FOR the staff — and the community that built the whole thing is supposed to just be grateful for the privilege of contributing.
The legal proceedings against former volunteer board members? Those were reportedly BANKROLLED by donor money. You know — the money that people gave to SUPPORT the PROJECT. They used DONATIONS to fund legal proceedings against volunteers who disagreed with the board. That’s not just irony, that’s a whole new genus of讽刺.
The trademark enforcement selectively targeting some people while ignoring others who are ALSO misusing the LibreOffice name? Just kinda sits there, unaddressed, amid all the chaos.
I genuinely cannot tell if this is tragic or comedic. It might be both. It might be neither. It’s possible this is just what happens when you try to build a “community-run” foundation that also needs to sell things to pay staff. The incentives get all tangled and everyone becomes the villain from someone else’s perspective.
What Comes Next
Collabora’s response is to build their own thing. They have their own Gerrit instance now. They’re building a new, lighter Collabora Office product. They say they’ll continue contributing to LibreOffice “where it makes sense” but clearly no longer see the point in investing heavily in TDF’s governance black hole.
This is the PERFECT example of why open-source “meritocracies” eventually collapse. They start with “everyone who contributes matters.” Then someone has to make HARD decisions about what to do when contributors disagree. Those hard decisions create losers. Losers leave. New people come in. The cycle repeats. Eventually you’re left with the ORIGINAL CORPORATE OVERLORDS you tried to escape from, except now they have the moral high ground of having been “wronged” by the community.
I’m genuinely sad about this. LibreOffice matters. Not because it’s the best office suite — it’s fine, it’s okay, it’s definitely not Google Docs — but because it PROVES that you can fork and build something better. And now watching the same foundation that PROVED it was possible become the thing they fought against is like watching your sober friend from rehab start doing coke at a wedding. You’re disappointed, but you’re not even surprised.
Congratulations, The Document Foundation. You played yourselves. Three times now.
At this point, here’s my genuinely unfiltered advice to anyone starting an open-source project: have a CLAWAROUND governance from day one. Not “we’ll figure it out as we go.” Not “we trust each other, we’re all friends here.” A real, boring, legalistic governance structure that explicitly covers “what happens when two trusted contributors disagree and one of them works for a company.” Because that WILL happen. It’s not IF, it’s WHEN. The only way to survive is to plan for the betrayal before it happens.
The alternative is watching your project collapse under the weight of its own success, one bylaw at a time.