On June 30, 2025, The Document Foundation’s Board of Directors voted to terminate the membership of several developers who form the backbone of LibreOffice’s codebase. Not marginal contributors. Not casual volunteers. The people who write the overwhelming majority of the code that makes LibreOffice function. The decision, disclosed in a blog post by Collabora Online, has sent shockwaves through the open-source software community and raised fundamental questions about what happens when a foundation’s governance apparatus turns against the very engineers sustaining its flagship product.
The expelled members include developers employed by Collabora and allotropia, two companies that together account for roughly 80% of all commits to the LibreOffice codebase. These aren’t peripheral figures. Michael Meeks, a longtime LibreOffice architect and Collabora’s general manager for the project, was among those removed. So were other senior engineers whose daily work keeps LibreOffice competitive with Microsoft Office and Google Docs. The Foundation didn’t just trim the edges. It cut the trunk.
The Document Foundation, or TDF, is a Berlin-based nonprofit established in 2010 to steward LibreOffice after the community forked from Oracle’s OpenOffice.org. Its governance model grants membership to individuals who demonstrate sustained contribution — code, documentation, translations, community organizing. Members elect the Board of Directors, which in turn sets policy and manages the Foundation’s considerable resources, including an estimated €5 million or more in annual donations and reserves that have grown substantially over the years. The membership body is, in theory, the democratic check on the board’s power.
That check just got weaker.
According to Collabora’s account, the board invoked a provision in TDF’s statutes allowing it to expel members by a two-thirds supermajority vote. The stated rationale centered on alleged conflicts of interest — the claim being that developers employed by commercial entities like Collabora and allotropia cannot serve as independent Foundation members because their corporate affiliations compromise their judgment. This argument has been simmering inside TDF for years, but the June 30 vote represents its most dramatic escalation.
The conflict-of-interest framing deserves scrutiny. Open-source foundations worldwide grapple with the tension between volunteer governance and corporate contribution. The Linux Foundation, the Apache Software Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation — all of them incorporate corporate participants into their governance structures, sometimes formally, sometimes informally. The model works because the code doesn’t write itself. Companies employ developers to work on open-source projects full-time, and those developers naturally seek a voice in how the projects they build are governed. Excluding them creates a paradox: the people with the deepest technical knowledge and the greatest stake in the software’s quality are denied input on its direction.
TDF’s board appears to have resolved this paradox by choosing exclusion. Collabora’s blog post describes the decision as “a brazen move to consolidate power” and argues that the board is prioritizing organizational control over the health of the project. The post doesn’t mince words: “The Board has chosen to eject the people who actually build LibreOffice.”
The timing matters. TDF has been accumulating financial reserves while, according to multiple accounts from developers, investing relatively little back into core development. Collabora and allotropia fund the lion’s share of engineering work on LibreOffice through their commercial products — Collabora Online and allotropia’s LibreOffice-based offerings. The Foundation collects donations from users who believe they’re supporting LibreOffice development, but a significant portion of those funds has gone toward administrative costs, marketing, and reserve accumulation rather than direct code contribution.
This financial dynamic has been a source of friction for years. Developers who do the work see the Foundation sitting on growing reserves. The Foundation’s board, meanwhile, has expressed concern about corporate influence over the project’s direction. Both sides have legitimate grievances. But expelling core contributors doesn’t resolve the underlying tension — it detonates it.
What happens next is unclear, but several scenarios are already being discussed in developer forums and on social media. The most dramatic possibility: a fork. LibreOffice itself was born from a fork, when developers left OpenOffice.org over Oracle’s stewardship. The conditions that precipitated that split — a governing entity hostile to its most active contributors, a codebase maintained primarily by people outside the foundation’s inner circle — bear uncomfortable resemblance to the current situation.
Collabora has not explicitly threatened a fork, but the blog post’s language is suggestive. “We will continue to develop and improve Collabora Online and our contributions to LibreOffice regardless of TDF’s decisions,” the company stated. That’s diplomatic phrasing for: we control the engineering talent, and we’ll go where we need to go.
A fork would be messy. LibreOffice’s brand recognition, while modest compared to Microsoft Office, is significant in government, education, and enterprise Linux deployments across Europe and beyond. The Foundation holds the trademark. But trademarks don’t compile code. And if the developers who produce 80% of the commits decide to direct their energy elsewhere, the remaining 20% won’t sustain a competitive office suite for long.
The open-source community’s reaction has been swift and largely critical of TDF’s board. Discussions on Hacker News, the Fediverse, and developer mailing lists have drawn parallels to other governance crises — the OpenSSL funding drought that preceded the Heartbleed vulnerability, the Node.js fork into io.js, the contentious departure of Elasticsearch’s creators to form OpenSearch under pressure from Amazon. Each of these episodes illustrated the same lesson: when the people writing the code lose faith in the institution ostensibly supporting them, the institution’s authority evaporates quickly.
Some observers have been more measured. Open-source governance expert Simon Phipps, writing on social media, noted that TDF’s statutes do grant the board broad authority over membership and that the legal question of whether the expulsions were procedurally valid is separate from whether they were wise. The two questions lead to very different conversations. Procedural validity is a matter for German nonprofit law. Wisdom is a matter for the community.
And the community is watching.
The broader implications extend beyond LibreOffice. Governments across the European Union have invested heavily in open-source alternatives to proprietary software, with LibreOffice serving as a cornerstone of digital sovereignty initiatives in Germany, France, Italy, and elsewhere. The European Commission itself has promoted open-source adoption. If LibreOffice’s development capacity is compromised by a governance crisis, those investments are at risk. Procurement officials who chose LibreOffice partly because of its foundation-backed governance model may now question whether that model is functioning.
For Collabora specifically, the stakes are both existential and commercial. The company’s Collabora Online product — a cloud-based office suite built on LibreOffice technology — competes directly with Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 in the European public sector market. Collabora has invested millions in engineering talent to make LibreOffice viable for enterprise deployment. Being expelled from the Foundation that nominally governs the upstream project doesn’t just insult the engineers. It threatens the commercial model that funds their work.
allotropia, a smaller German company founded by former LibreOffice developers, faces similar concerns. The company’s founder, Thorsten Behrens, was himself a longtime TDF board member before the current governance disputes intensified. His perspective — that of someone who has sat on both sides of the table — adds complexity to the narrative. These aren’t outsiders trying to co-opt an open-source project. They’re insiders who helped build it from the beginning.
The conflict also exposes a structural weakness in TDF’s governance design. Unlike the Apache Software Foundation, which requires all contributions to be made under individual contributor license agreements and maintains strict project management committees, TDF’s model blurred the line between organizational membership and technical authority. The board governs the Foundation, but it doesn’t govern the codebase in any practical sense — it can’t compel anyone to write code, review patches, or fix bugs. By expelling the developers, the board has asserted organizational authority while undermining the technical capacity that gives the organization its reason to exist.
This is the fundamental contradiction. A foundation without its core developers is a shell. A brand. A bank account. It can issue press releases and hold conferences. But it can’t ship software that works.
The expelled developers, for their part, retain full access to LibreOffice’s source code under the Mozilla Public License. Open-source licenses are irrevocable. No board vote can change that. The code is free, and the people who know it best are free to take it wherever they choose. What they’ve lost is their voice in TDF’s governance — their ability to vote for board members, influence Foundation policy, and shape the project’s official direction. Whether that loss matters more to them than the freedom to build is the question that will determine what comes next.
Several industry watchers have drawn attention to the financial dimension. TDF’s annual reports show reserves that have grown steadily, even as the Foundation’s direct investment in development has remained flat or declined in relative terms. Donations flow in from individuals and organizations who associate the LibreOffice brand with the software they use. But the software they use is built primarily by Collabora and allotropia engineers. The Foundation acts as an intermediary — collecting funds generated by the brand, which is sustained by code it doesn’t primarily write. Removing the code writers from the governance structure doesn’t change this dependency. It just makes it adversarial.
The situation carries echoes of a pattern familiar to anyone who has watched open-source projects mature. In the early years, enthusiasm and shared purpose paper over governance gaps. As the project grows, money enters the picture — donations, commercial deployments, government contracts. The stakes rise. Governance structures designed for a small community of volunteers prove inadequate for managing competing interests among corporations, nonprofits, and individual contributors. The result is friction, then crisis.
LibreOffice is now in the crisis phase.
What TDF’s board does in the coming weeks will determine whether this crisis resolves through negotiation or rupture. A negotiated outcome would likely involve reinstating the expelled members, reforming the conflict-of-interest policies to accommodate corporate contributors with appropriate transparency requirements, and establishing clearer rules for how Foundation funds are allocated to development. This is the path that preserves the project’s unity and the Foundation’s relevance.
Rupture looks different. It means a fork — possibly under a new name, possibly under a new foundation, almost certainly with the same developers writing the same code. The existing LibreOffice brand would remain with TDF, but the engineering momentum would shift elsewhere. Users would face a choice. Governments would face procurement reviews. And TDF would face the question of what, exactly, it governs.
Neither outcome is certain. But the expelled developers have leverage that no board vote can revoke: they know how to build the software, and they’re willing to do the work. In open source, that’s the only currency that ultimately matters.
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