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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. The topic of the discussion was the membership committee deciding not to renew the memberships of three active contributors, including Nouws and Bjoern Michaelsen; the audit results were used as part of the justification to deny renewals.
Nouws shared an email sent by Gustavo Buzzatti Pacheco that included findings from the 2023 audit report that match up with more general statements published by Vignoli. According to Pacheco, the auditor listed several problems. For example, his email stated that the audit concluded there was a misuse of funds in the amount of €20,599.62, and the board may have misused funds in previous years. In addition, he wrote that it found that the board had contacted a new law firm "to provide advice that did not serve the foundations' statutory purpose".
The problems identified in the report meant that there was a possibility that the foundation's status as a nonprofit entity could be revoked, and it could face tax payments and penalties that might jeopardize the foundation altogether. Pacheco said that, since Nouws had been involved in the decisions "that led to the unacceptably serious situation TDF faces today", the committee had chosen not to renew his membership.
Simon Phipps, who had at one time been on the membership committee and is currently serving as deputy chairperson of the board, questioned the committee's decision. He cited the membership requirements and said the only grounds in the statutes for non-renewal were "the absence of an application or the failure to indicate the intention to participate".
Board member Paolo Vecchi replied that "the bylaws provide the MC with full authority over this". Phipps argued that TDF's statutes did not grant the committee the power to withhold membership if a person met the requirements, and that expulsion of a member required a separate process with a hearing. Eyal Rozenberg pointed out that the document Vecchi cited was not valid community bylaws, and complained that the membership committee had not held a hearing or communicated its intent to expel the members. "So, they have done nothing wrong which merits an expulsion, in the sense no process within the TDF has demonstrated any such wrongdoing."
The discussion continued off and on through April 2025. At one point Vecchi argued that the situation was complex "as we have to consider the German Stock Corporation Act" for matters not clearly stated in TDF's statutes. He argued that the committee could have revoked the memberships while the individuals were on the board, "due to acts that looked like they were going pretty much against TDF's best interests", but that it had only received written confirmation of that, in the form of the audits, during the current board term.
Let's anyway evaluate the situation as if it were an expulsion, which [it] is not, and hear what the person has to say. The MC still has an audit confirming the acts that justify the expulsion so what would be the point of a hearing?
Rozenberg replied that the matter is not complex, and said that "a foundation is not a Stock Corporation". He said that Vecchi had "put quite a bit of effort in making [the situation] more complex and troubling", and called for him to be "taken out of the [board of directors] as soon as possible".
Delayed elections and new bylaws
According to the usual election schedule, TDF members were supposed to have an opportunity to elect a new board at the end of 2025, with the changes to take effect in February 2026. That has not happened, however, for reasons we will get into shortly. According to the statutes, the foundation should hold elections every two years for the board of directors and membership committee.
The board and membership committee elections are generally offset by a year; the most recent membership committee election was held in 2024. The most recent board election was held in 2023, and directors took office in February 2024. Vecchi was initially a deputy on the board; he was seated as a full member after another board member resigned. The election process should have begun in October 2025; the current board's term expired in February of this year.
The membership committee did not begin the board election process, however, and did not announce its intention to delay the election. While the election should have been ongoing, the board was working on new bylaws. In November 2025, board member Sophie Gautier announced an initial version of additional bylaws ("community bylaws") to extend TDF's statutes, which included a section dealing with revocation of membership. It included some fairly standard reasons a person might lose membership, such as abusing other members on TDF discussion forums, violating the code of conduct, and (of course) members could voluntarily notify the committee that they wish to resign for whatever reason.
The proposed bylaws also featured a somewhat unusual condition: a requirement that members affiliated with "a company/organization having a dispute or case with TDF" must resign immediately. Failing that, the committee can cancel the person's membership and block reapplication "for a suitable time frame". The nature of a dispute or case was not defined. Unsurprisingly, there was a fair amount of debate about the proposed bylaws in the announcement thread.
A final version was submitted for a vote on January 15 as a joint proposal from Gautier and Vecchi; she said that TDF urgently needed to show a change in behavior, and that the bylaws were part of that. Meeks said that it was "deeply unfortunate to vote these through in this profoundly flawed form", and that there was an important question left unanswered:
Has this text been checked and confirmed as being fully compatible with the statutes by a qualified and insured Rechtsanwalt in Germany who has suitable liability insurance and is a member of the bar?
No one, to date, has given a direct answer to that question. I posed the question to Vignoli by email; he responded that the bylaws had been reviewed "by lawyers", but did not confirm that the lawyers were practicing in Germany or licensed to practice there.
Meeks also quoted the final text of the bylaws (ODF document) which now state that members "involved in legal claims for endangering the foundation" must resign their membership by notifying the membership committee; in addition, the bylaws also state that if a member is affiliated with a company or organization involved in a legal claim, then the member must resign as well. If a member does not resign voluntarily, the membership committee can revoke the membership, and the person is not eligible to apply again "for a period of no less than three years". Meeks asked if the board could specify which organizations that would apply to and said: "It would be good to know whom the board thinks should resign from the membership before the next elections start."
Phipps objected to the vote and called for the motion to be withdrawn. It was not, and on January 19, TDF's executive director Florian Effenberger announced that the vote had passed with five in favor and one opposed, no abstentions. There was a great deal of further debate over the fact that Phipps's vote was not counted because, according to Effenberger, the vote included a conditional and was not valid.
Vignoli said in an email that the members who were removed were informed in advance with two separate messages before their memberships were revoked. "So, the suspension did not come out of the blue." He said that no one was happy about applying this new rule to the members, but it was "a necessary evil, to prevent unforeseen consequences for the foundation." The behavior of many people from both parties had led to a situation that was difficult to solve. "At the moment, the focus is on a solution, not on details (and in this case the three years of suspension are a detail, although important, but still a detail)".
Old wounds and old problems
Many of the people involved in this current situation were part of the formation of TDF and have been participating in its development since the beginning; indeed, even before its beginning, in the days before Sun Microsystems was bought by Oracle, and OpenOffice.org was sent to languish at the Apache Software Foundation. It is clear from reading the public discussions, both new and old threads, as well as communicating with people involved in TDF and those removed from its membership, that there are differing opinions about how to achieve the foundation's goals, the roles that ecosystem companies should play in developing LibreOffice, as well as some deep personal grievances between members of the various factions that have evolved over the years.
For example, in 2019 there was a plan approved by the board to create a community benefit company called The Document Collective (TDC) that would conduct "commercial activities that complement the community's work" (begins at slide 19). It was controversial at the time and never got off the ground; in July 2024, the board's decision was revoked, effectively killing it for good. But it has remained at the forefront of the current discussions.
The problems around trademark usage and use of funds stem from efforts over the years to find ways to fund LibreOffice development and effectively promote its usage in an ever-changing market. In 2020, Meeks outlined problems faced by "ecosystem companies" in a message that is worth reading in full. As he noted, he looked at the problem from a vendor's point of view, but the problems he identified are real ones that are common where open-source projects and vendors meet. Collabora has had a hard time finding ways to differentiate its products against LibreOffice in order to monetize its work to ensure that it can continue to contribute to the project.
In a discussion in 2023, Jean-Baptiste Faure complained about conflicts of interest and said that companies with members on the board of directors "should not be allowed to respond to a call for tenders from TDF". Meeks responded that the issue of conflicts of interest in awarding tenders was overstated, and that board members were "completely recused" on matters related to competing tenders and provided some context:
Let me put some rough, perhaps not already public, numbers to this - [Collabora] has bid on ~24 tenders and won ~7 - ie. under 1/3rd of them. We've been in business for ~10 years. A rough adding up of what TDF has paid in total comes to some small (single digit?) %age of both TDF's income, and Collabora's. That seems neither excessive nor under-contested to me.
In an email to me, Meeks said: "TDF are by a very long distance our worst ever customer, the staggering expense of dealing with all of this angst wipes out any commercial benefit."
Despite any angst in dealing with TDF, Collabora has had a huge hand in LibreOffice development through the years. According to a state of the project blog post published on April 9, Collabora was the largest single contributor to LibreOffice in the last 12 months based on Git data; 47 people employed by Collabora contributed 43% of the patches, while eight developers employed by TDF were responsible for 37% of the patches. Thus, TDF has effectively removed many of its most prolific contributors from any say in governance of the foundation. It has not barred them from contributing if they so choose, but it does not seem likely to motivate future contributions from individuals or Collabora.
TDF had anticipated that, however. In the "end to speculation" blog post, Vignoli said that the foundation had been "preparing for some time for Collabora's announcement, by hiring developers and exploring new partnership opportunities". LWN covered some of the tensions about hiring its own developers in 2022. Vignoli elaborated on what he meant by preparing in a post on April 17:
It would be a mistake to read the current moment as purely defensive. While managing a governance crisis that it did not choose, TDF has continued to invest in the software and the community that give the foundation its purpose.
In the past twelve months, TDF's eight staff developers contributed 4,077 patches to LibreOffice. Two additional developers have recently joined TDF staff, with one specifically assigned to LibreOffice Base, a module that has been under-resourced for years. Also, work is underway on deeper code modernization: architectural improvements that have accumulated for decades and that require sustained, focused effort rather than feature-driven patch contributions. Announcements on this work are forthcoming.
TDF's income is primarily in the form of donations; according to the public ledgers, it received more than €1,976,000 in donations in the 2025 calendar year. It spent about €590,000 on contractors ("freelancers"), and about €500,000 on employee salaries and taxes during the same period. Time will tell how the foundation's strategy to bring more development in-house works out.
It is still an open question whether TDF's nuclear option of removing all Collabora-affiliated members was actually something specifically recommended by auditors or legal counsel. Behrens does not think so, and said this in an email:
I consider the expulsion without apology of so many long-time contributors to LibreOffice to be deeply hurtful. They are also likely illegal, disproportionate & in no way useful to solve any of TDF's past or future problems. Instead, it seems to be the power-grab of a desperate & unpopular board, ahead of elections.
Vignoli's April 17 blog post, however, claims the move is "a governance safeguard doing exactly what governance safeguards are designed to do". He also said "a foundation even partially governed by the people associated with its largest commercial contributor is not a foundation but a subsidiary". That is, to say the least, an unusual view. Plenty of open-source foundations and similar bodies have representation from their largest commercial contributors. At any rate, TDF had already demonstrated the ability to block someone from serving on the membership committee despite being voted into the office by trustees.
Specifically, in 2024, the board decided not to seat Nouws on the membership committee despite the fact that he garnered enough votes. Instead, the board voted (five in favor, two against) to pass him over and appoint another candidate on the basis of conflicts of interest and Nouws's past actions. The announcement included board member László Németh's objection to the decision as a comment. He said that one of the board's directors had "bypassed official channels" to seek legal advice about whether Nouws's "past actions as a director [are] to be taken in consideration by this board to evaluate if he should ever again become [a] member of one of TDF's bodies?"
Effenberger has announced that the board will hold meetings on April 20 and April 22 for strategic planning "regarding the next steps of the LibreOffice development". Those calls will be private, but he said that the board would keep the community posted on next steps and engage in a public discussion. At some point, presumably, the membership committee should be announcing the overdue board election. Meeks said that he hopes TDF "will engage constructively in mediation" to solve the disagreements between the parties. "There have been a number of generous offers around this on the table for months or even years now. I look forward to engaging with them there."
There is little doubt that this will be an eventful year for TDF and LibreOffice. Its next election, when it finally arrives, is bound to stir up some pointed conversations. It will also be interesting to see what comes from Collabora's plans of a streamlined Collabora Office and whether it can build a community around its own fork. We will, of course, be covering things along the way.
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