Digging into drama at The Document Foundation

Please consider subscribing to LWN

Subscriptions are the lifeblood of LWN.net. If you appreciate this content and would like to see more of it, your subscription will help to ensure that LWN continues to thrive. Please visit this page to join up and keep LWN on the net.

The Document Foundation (TDF) is the nonprofit entity behind the LibreOffice productivity suite. Most of the time, the software takes the spotlight, but that has changed in the past few weeks, and not for pleasant reasons. TDF has revoked foundation membership status from about 30 people who work for or have contracting status with Collabora. In response, Collabora has announced plans to focus on a "entirely new, cut-down, differentiated Collabora Office" project and reduce its involvement with LibreOffice. TDF's representatives claim that its actions were necessary to maintain the foundation's nonprofit status, while other community members assert that this is part of a power grab. The facts seem to indicate that there are legitimate issues to be addressed, but it is unclear that TDF needed to go so far as to disenfranchise all Collabora-affiliated contributors.

Membership and contribution

Understanding the current dispute requires going into the weeds of the foundation's governance, and its relationship with Collabora. TDF is a Stiftung, a type of nonprofit foundation, that was incorporated in Berlin in 2012. The foundation's objective is to support the development of open-source office software and to promote its use. To facilitate that, TDF holds LibreOffice assets such as its trademarks, as well as funds to support development, put on community events, and so forth.

Its statutes outline three bodies; the board of trustees (TDF's members), the membership committee, and the board of directors. The trustees elect the membership committee and board of directors; the membership committee oversees membership applications and renewals, as well as the board of directors elections. Note that this article quotes from the English version of the statutes provided for convenience; the German text is the legally binding version, and it is possible there are subtle differences.

To become a member, a contributor has to submit an application to the membership committee. For the application to be approved, the committee must be able to verify that a person has dedicated "more than three months of verifiable time and intellectual work" toward the foundation's goals; this can be any non-trivial programming, translation, documentation, creating marketing material, or other tasks. In addition, the applicant has to indicate that they plan to continue contributing for at least six months. If approved, the membership term lasts one year, and renewal is not automatic; those who wish to continue their membership have to apply to renew each year, and the committee can simply let a person's membership lapse.

A person does not have to be a member of the foundation to contribute to LibreOffice; but being a member is necessary to have a say in TDF governance by standing for the board, membership committee, or voting for the same. The board is responsible for deciding how the foundation's assets are used and how money is spent, which in turn influences the direction of LibreOffice overall.

Collabora's Productivity division was formed in 2013 when the company took over SUSE's LibreOffice business and the team that had worked on LibreOffice for SUSE joined the company. It committed to contribute 100% of its improvements to LibreOffice back upstream to TDF. To date, it has been the largest corporate contributor to the project. It currently offers products and services based on LibreOffice, including Collabora Online, which is a web-based office suite, a mobile version for Android or iOS, and a desktop version. The Online product has been at the center of controversy in the past and is again; LWN covered Collabora moving its development efforts away from LibreOffice Online to Collabora Online in 2020. TDF froze work on LibreOffice Online in 2022, and recently brought it out of retirement.

Public discussion

A blog post by Italo Vignoli, in response to Collabora's announcement, acknowledged that TDF had revoked membership from those affiliated with Collabora.

It was fairly light on details, but said that TDF's community bylaws "require that employees of companies involved in legal disputes" with the foundation be removed from TDF's membership "because, in the past, people made decisions in the interest of their employers rather than in the interest of The Document Foundation". It did not, however, provide any detail about the nature of any legal disputes with Collabora. The hint that there might be an ongoing lawsuit between TDF and Collabora caused a great deal of speculation about what might be going on.

After the members were ejected, the board-discuss section of the foundation's Discourse forum was flooded with messages, such as this, pointedly thanking the removed members for their work on LibreOffice. In addition, Collabora's announcement ensured that the news spread quickly; however, while what had happened was widely known, why the TDF would take such action was still a mystery to many.

On April 5, Vignoli posted a follow-up titled "Let's put an end to the speculation" with additional details. He said that the organization would have liked to avoid discussing the events that led to ejecting members affiliated with Collabora.

Vignoli said that there were decisions made by previous TDF boards of directors "found to be incorrect for reasons relating to the nonprofit law" by the foundation's lawyers. The decisions in question were the awarding of contracts ("tenders") for LibreOffice work to companies that, at the time, had representatives on TDF's board of directors, and that "companies in the ecosystem" (presumably referring to Collabora and CIB) were improperly granted free use of the LibreOffice trademarks for the purpose of selling the suite through Apple and Microsoft's online stores.

In a Q&A post published on April 10, Vignoli addressed the question of legal disputes with Collabora.

There is not an ongoing lawsuit, but there is mediation of some sort happening:

There are legal consultations between TDF lawyers and Collabora lawyers about situations in the past where Collabora representatives elected to the Board of Directors of The Document Foundation and with a clear Conflict of Interest have taken decision in the interest of the company and not in the interest of the non-profit foundation, creating the risk of loss of non-profit status to the foundation itself.

TDF's board has seven members as well as up to three substitute members ("deputies") who can take the place of a board member who can no longer serve for some reason. The board seated at the time period that Vignoli specified (the end of 2021 to mid-2022) included three people affiliated with the companies said to improperly benefit from board decisions: Thorsten Behrens, Michael Meeks, and Cor Nouws. At the time, Behrens was affiliated with CIB which also provides LibreOffice-based software. Meeks and Nouws were employed by Collabora. Behrens is now also employed by Collabora following his move to allotropia which later merged with Collabora in May 2025.

In response to questions via email, Behrens acknowledged that he was CEO of one of the companies that had received a trademark license to publish LibreOffice on the Windows store. TDF wanted to publish on the Apple and Windows stores but did not want to provide free downloads, he said. Thus it turned to ecosystem companies (Collabora and CIB) to do the work of putting LibreOffice in the stores. The trademark policy was changed to allow blocking "the massive amount of scam offers on those stores" around LibreOffice that were difficult for TDF to counter. The new policy, he said, allowed TDF to ask Apple and Microsoft to handle takedowns of scam offers.

So, bottom line: nobody did anything illegal, everything was done to support TDF & LibreOffice. But good intentions don't much matter, if a lawyer says you're doing it wrong - so we stopped this immediately in 2022, after we had learned about the **potential problems** with non-profit laws.

This was possible then for TDF to continue, since the work to get LibreOffice ready for the stores **had already been done by the ecosystem companies**, and it was considered less risky to do business on the stores (despite being a charity), rather than continue the [trademark] agreements.

Vignoli's blog post, however, claimed that matters raised by TDF's lawyers could have been resolved quickly, but the board failed to make any progress due to "years of discussions marked by accusations and finger-pointing". At some point, he said, German authorities requested an audit "whose results confirmed that resolving the issues was absolutely necessary to avoid losing non-profit status". According to the blog post, there were three audits; the first audit (in 2023) "raised concerns", and the second (in 2024) confirmed them.

Fortunately, the introduction of restrictive measures – such as the decision to forfeit TDF membership status of Collabora employees – and the freezing of tenders, alongside the introduction of a robust procurement policy for development, has resulted in a positive outcome for the third audit. At least, the [board of directors] has demonstrated a willingness to break the deadlock that has persisted since 2022.

TDF has not made the results of the audits public, and it is unclear if they have been widely shared with the membership; I have exchanged several emails with Vignoli and spoke to him by video chat while researching this article. In one exchange I asked if the foundation would publish the audits or even confirm the audit firms that it had worked with. He said that the foundation "cannot share the audits and names of the auditors in public". On April 17, Meeks posted an update in which he wrote that TDF is making misleading claims: "there is no confirmed misuse of funds in the most up-to-date audit".

Non-renewals

Some snippets from an audit, however, appear to have leaked out via public conversations on the forum in a discussion started by Dennis Roczek in January 2025.