I do not know enough about this particular drama to have any opinion on the merits of the sides involved. However, I cannot help but notice the parallels with the infancy of TDF and the separation of LibreOffice from OpenOffice.org. In 2010, Oracle demanded the resignation of every TDF member from the OOo Community Council that was nominally its governance board; this constituted the removal of every community member (ie, non Oracle employee) from the council [1]; I don't know the full details of what happened after the meeting [2], but it seems like the TDF members refused to resign and that they were removed. The justification was quite similar to the justification here [3]: that the TDF members had a conflict of interest by virtue of being TDF members, and that they could continue to be involved if they left TDF.
Fix the title. No one seems to recognize "TDF" (The Document Foundation) despite their daily dramatics, myself included.
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phkahler
How about a different take: This isn't really about two open source organizations fighting. It's a psyop from the powers that want to stop the digital sovereignty initiatives going on around the world by amplifying some friction that already existed. People won't want to use products with so much drama and uncertainty.
TDF needs to eject the members who pulled the strings hardest on this - they are plants.
Damn I didn't know I had that much of a tinfoil hat.
As an outsider it's pretty opaque to me. I think the Document Foundation (handling LibreOffice) wanted to (re)release an online office suite that seems to compete with Collabora, which sells one. But the biggest contributors to LibreOffice are Collabora employees. I thought maybe they feared Collabora taking over the org, but it looks like there are formal legal disputes between the two, I think (see the post from the LibreOffice side https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/04/01/comment-...).
And of course when legal issues are involved everyone is being very vague. I just hope it doesn't hurt LibreOffice's development too badly.
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elric
TDF apparently refers to The Document Foundation, the foundation behind things like LibreOffice.
ecshafer
> There are many great ways to contribute to FLOSS projects and coding is only one of them - let me underline that.
I've seen this a lot and really disagree. Maybe writing books or evangelism is useful, but those are still technical. These foundation boards and groups get filled up with people padding their career resume and make detrimental choices to oss. They want to get "Board member of X foundation" so they can try to get a corpo board seat.
I might not be the target audience here but reading this I'm having trouble understanding what actually happened and why.
khalic
So, basically, TDF doesn’t want Collabora (a company) people on their board. The technical vs non-technical framing seems contrived at best. The excuse by TDF seems… suspicious.
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mikkupikku
What are the plausible motivations for the TDF board members here? Do they pay themselves with org funds, or is it just a fight for turf and clout? I think identifying factors like this might be helpful, because if these factors could be eliminated or reduced it might save future orgs from infestations of the sort of people who seek out boards to sit on, as they'd find a better opportunity for parasitism in some other org.
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clcaev
Why do these open source foundations (like Mozilla) have direct products anyway? Why not a certification? Who should the users be and why? Who are the collaborators and competitors? These are hard questions.
At least with free software licenses we can separate the copyrights from the trademarks, and exercise the right to fork if a trademark owner is captured and misbehaves.
c-c-c-c-c
seems like a lot of drama in the open source document space, this seems unrelated to the OnlyOffice fork [1]. Interesting future ahead!
Are the people responsible for the "LibreOffice Personal Edition" the ones ejected or the ones staying?
philipwhiuk
On the one hand a foundation led by non-developers is bad.
On the other hand, a foundation captured by a single company and prevented on working on anything that the company works on for profit is also bad.
And finally, a 'personal blog' from someone who is actually senior at a company is a very weird back-hand submission. If the comments weren't defendable to put on the company blog, they probably aren't needed here either.
sgbeal
Please help me understand where the missing comma is supposed to be in:
> their Membership Committee has decided to eject from membership all Collabora staff and partners over thirty people who ...
Is it:
1) "eject from membership all Collabora staff and partners, over thirty people ..."
2) "eject from membership all Collabora staff and partners over thirty, people who ..."
(Downvoted for asking for legitimate clarification? Seriously? Age discrimination _is_ a real thing, so there's no way of knowing, for lack of a comma, which interpretation was intended.)
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bakugo
Why does an open source project, apparently developed by a handful of core developers, have a "board", a "membership committee", "elections" etc? And why do these include people who do not contribute directly to development at all?
Let me guess, these same people also pushed to introduce a "code of conduct" to the project?
show comments
yuumei
Wow that list of commits is brutal. Libre Office is dead. Just another corporate take over of an open source project.
I do not know enough about this particular drama to have any opinion on the merits of the sides involved. However, I cannot help but notice the parallels with the infancy of TDF and the separation of LibreOffice from OpenOffice.org. In 2010, Oracle demanded the resignation of every TDF member from the OOo Community Council that was nominally its governance board; this constituted the removal of every community member (ie, non Oracle employee) from the council [1]; I don't know the full details of what happened after the meeting [2], but it seems like the TDF members refused to resign and that they were removed. The justification was quite similar to the justification here [3]: that the TDF members had a conflict of interest by virtue of being TDF members, and that they could continue to be involved if they left TDF.
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/10/oracle-want... [2]: https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Community_Council_Log_20101... [3]: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/04/01/comment-...
Fix the title. No one seems to recognize "TDF" (The Document Foundation) despite their daily dramatics, myself included.
How about a different take: This isn't really about two open source organizations fighting. It's a psyop from the powers that want to stop the digital sovereignty initiatives going on around the world by amplifying some friction that already existed. People won't want to use products with so much drama and uncertainty.
TDF needs to eject the members who pulled the strings hardest on this - they are plants.
Damn I didn't know I had that much of a tinfoil hat.
Thread on the Collabora post he authored: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47599305
TDF's response got posted but did not gain traction here (so far): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47609108
There's more context in another HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47602859
As an outsider it's pretty opaque to me. I think the Document Foundation (handling LibreOffice) wanted to (re)release an online office suite that seems to compete with Collabora, which sells one. But the biggest contributors to LibreOffice are Collabora employees. I thought maybe they feared Collabora taking over the org, but it looks like there are formal legal disputes between the two, I think (see the post from the LibreOffice side https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/04/01/comment-...).
And of course when legal issues are involved everyone is being very vague. I just hope it doesn't hurt LibreOffice's development too badly.
TDF apparently refers to The Document Foundation, the foundation behind things like LibreOffice.
> There are many great ways to contribute to FLOSS projects and coding is only one of them - let me underline that.
I've seen this a lot and really disagree. Maybe writing books or evangelism is useful, but those are still technical. These foundation boards and groups get filled up with people padding their career resume and make detrimental choices to oss. They want to get "Board member of X foundation" so they can try to get a corpo board seat.
TDF is https://www.documentfoundation.org
I might not be the target audience here but reading this I'm having trouble understanding what actually happened and why.
So, basically, TDF doesn’t want Collabora (a company) people on their board. The technical vs non-technical framing seems contrived at best. The excuse by TDF seems… suspicious.
What are the plausible motivations for the TDF board members here? Do they pay themselves with org funds, or is it just a fight for turf and clout? I think identifying factors like this might be helpful, because if these factors could be eliminated or reduced it might save future orgs from infestations of the sort of people who seek out boards to sit on, as they'd find a better opportunity for parasitism in some other org.
Why do these open source foundations (like Mozilla) have direct products anyway? Why not a certification? Who should the users be and why? Who are the collaborators and competitors? These are hard questions.
At least with free software licenses we can separate the copyrights from the trademarks, and exercise the right to fork if a trademark owner is captured and misbehaves.
seems like a lot of drama in the open source document space, this seems unrelated to the OnlyOffice fork [1]. Interesting future ahead!
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47601168
It's the "tyranny of structure"
Are the people responsible for the "LibreOffice Personal Edition" the ones ejected or the ones staying?
On the one hand a foundation led by non-developers is bad.
On the other hand, a foundation captured by a single company and prevented on working on anything that the company works on for profit is also bad.
And finally, a 'personal blog' from someone who is actually senior at a company is a very weird back-hand submission. If the comments weren't defendable to put on the company blog, they probably aren't needed here either.
Please help me understand where the missing comma is supposed to be in:
> their Membership Committee has decided to eject from membership all Collabora staff and partners over thirty people who ...
Is it:
1) "eject from membership all Collabora staff and partners, over thirty people ..."
2) "eject from membership all Collabora staff and partners over thirty, people who ..."
:-?
Edit: that's from the article this post leads to: <https://www.collaboraonline.com/blog/tdf-ejects-its-core-dev...>
(Downvoted for asking for legitimate clarification? Seriously? Age discrimination _is_ a real thing, so there's no way of knowing, for lack of a comma, which interpretation was intended.)
Why does an open source project, apparently developed by a handful of core developers, have a "board", a "membership committee", "elections" etc? And why do these include people who do not contribute directly to development at all?
Let me guess, these same people also pushed to introduce a "code of conduct" to the project?
Wow that list of commits is brutal. Libre Office is dead. Just another corporate take over of an open source project.