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.
- LibreOfficeOnLine (LOOL) was created within The Document Foundation (TDF) but largely developed by Collabora. It was source only and suggested users pay a company to host for them.
- Some within TDF wanted to offer LOOL as a binary offering.
- Collabora moved their contributions to Collabora Online, which they controlled.
- LOOL was archived.
- More recently, LOOL was revived
- Collabora is pissed
- Collabora gets booted from TDF
I suppose this is a fundamental issue with the model of a foundation "owning" a product but a separate for profit company doing all the work. There's always going to be some issue that the two sides disagree on (in this case, how the free version is distributed). The foundation then either has to give in*, and become irrelevant or stand up for their own position, in which case the company is basically forced to pull out their co-operation. It seems unlikely that TDF will be able to make any product progress, and I bet in a few years collabora gets what they want and returns to the fold. TDF will either be cowed forever or this situation will just repeat on the next conflict.
* Like with OpenAI, where the for-benefit part eventually capitulated and became an vestigial organ of a for-profit business.
So what were the contrived reasons? I navigated getting coolwsd built before, but never quite got my user management layer for Nextcloud perfected to the point of going live... I thought it was a good piece of kit, but was a little bit skeptical of the branding divergence at the time. Something about it kinda just felt like drama waiting to happen. Was that it do you think? Or something else. Will keep an eye on the project regardless.
Not from the board, (implies board of directors), but from TDF membership (board of trustees). This essentially means you have no voting power and no benefits, but you're still free to still contribute by fixing bugs, adding new features, mentoring, code review,... ("community"). This are all the things that would benefit TDF by getting more money from donations (and then use that money for useful things that are mentioned in this TDF blog post).
I read it, and was hoping I would be more sympathetic to their side, but it was essentially 'they violated the rules our newly added non-contributor board members set, and by those rules, we kicked them out'.
Essentially this 100% confirms the Collabora story, just elaborates a bit on how the administrative takeover was done.
I wish we would admit that you can't have it all. You can't have a product that is open source with neutral foundation governance and also have that same product be de facto proprietary. People have been pushing this bait-and-switch business model for too long.
It was not really proprietary though? I don't like Collabora Office at all as a product (sorry, and I have tried) and the branding situation is super messy (sorry but it's true) but all the code is online.
The company in question profits heavily from the open source nature of LibreOffice. They're a big government vendor in Europe, mainly because their codebase is perceived as open source.
Pro tip: If you're trying to raise awareness of an issue that's important to you, don't lard up your exposition with sarcasm, insider references and incomprehensible innuendo. If all you manage to communicate is that you're unhappy, people may feel sorry for you but they won't know why.
Say what you mean in plain language; explain the issues and why they matter, and let your readers come to their own conclusions.
I'm sorry it's confusing, perhaps an attempt to add humor to a bleak and dramatic change in the LibreOffice project has made it less than clear.
The bald facts are fairly simple: The Document Foundation, now ~controlled by its non-programmer staff just ejected its main core code contributors based on complicated and apparently contrived reasons. Lots of non-profits get bogged down in pointless in-fighting that eats away at their purpose sadly.
Hey Michael, that's alright but can you perhaps edit the article to have all the facts clear out there in the manner that Markus has said.
There are times to be satirical, don't get me wrong, but those are usually when the dust is settled and maybe a reminiscence on the past.
Have a nice day and I hope that something positive comes out of all of it. I always believe that there are only few projects which get to the eyes of the general public enough to get funded, LibreOffice is one of the very few. People trust Libreoffice with donations and money to fight against Microsoft and show a path of freedom.
For the document foundation to betray the people who programmed the code in the first place, is also, a betrayal of the people who have funded libreoffice for years, who would love to demand more answers and I hope that in the article, that you can talk _effectively_ to them. It's really sad to see all of this happen and I wish if something happens as I don't wish for people to lose hope in open source foundations with cases like these.
What are the complicated apparently contrived reasons?
It's not at all clear from the article.
All I really got from the article is "collabora are banned from contributing to open office, and aren't happy about it". What reason did they give? What's the actual reason you think it is (you mention things are contrived, so I assume there's another reason you think)? What's the libre office online stuff got to do with it?
This exactly sums up my read of this. I have no idea what is going on but it appears to impact a thing I use in my nextcloud so I should possibly care, but damned if I have any idea what is going on here.
It's called CODE in nextcloud which stands for Collabra Online Development Edition and it is integrated in nextcloud. It isbfor sure a thing. Don't try to confuse me more lol.
I'm no lawyer but I don't think the AGPL says you must use the same branding in a fork, in fact most hard forks tend to prefer changing it in my experience, as the original branding might be trademarked and so they can't legally use it themselves without permission, and/or they just want to distance themselves further from the parent.
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.
I have a feeling that the Open Document Foundation is going to end up being the loser here. Collabora is the entity that can fund development with a commercial offering. It sounds like they employ the core contributors to the project as well.
Regardless of who "wins," I'm just here to say that I like OnlyOffice a lot better and switched away from LibreOffice. I like that it just looks more like a modern program and overall feels less clunky.
Make sure to backup regularly. I don't know how good OnlyOffice is these days, but it definitely has (had?) a terrible history of quality control. We migrated off it a couple of years ago after losing several days of work due to severe (and, as it turned out, widely known) bugs in how it handled changes/document version tracking.
I only work with local files and I’m really not doing anything mission critical. Employer has the Microsoft office license. I just need a free thing to open the occasional thing.
OnlyOffice is not really open source. They say they are but they also add impossible conditions to their license. (you are forced to use their logo, but you are also not allowed to use their logo.)
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.
Most of his blogs are about how awful OOXML (Microsoft Office's open standard) formats are, and that everyone needs to switch to ODF (his preferred open standard).
What people don't want to use is products which don't work with everyone else's. LibreOffice works with Microsoft Office files really well, but for some reason Italo doesn't want you to know that. He wants the entire world to switch formats to LibreOffice's formats, but really that's just telling potential business users LibreOffice can't meet their needs... interacting with the existing monopoly of Microsoft Office users.
This is a self-sabotaging marketing approach. LibreOffice needs to be promoting itself as an excellent drop-in replacement for Microsoft Office which will easily interoperate with every other organization's office applications, regardless of format.
He's using this approach because the EU requires documents to be in an open format, and by him advocating that OOXML is only open by name, he can advance a legal argument that OpenDocument is the only acceptable format.
Office supports OpenDocument.l, it just doesn't use it by default.
I understand his approach but it's a dumb approach. OOXML is plenty open, proven by the fact LibreOffice works with it fine. The push to force Europe switch to ODF only serves to suggest LibreOffice isn't capable of replacing Microsoft Office (in a world where most other organizations use Office). This is a conversation I have at work, where people laugh when LibreOffice is mentioned and suggest it's incompatible and we can't consider it.
A far better marketing strategy would be to loudly announce, continually, that LibreOffice is the best software for handling Office files and ODF alike! And as people switch to LibreOffice and it defaults to ODF, that naturally grows.
Meanwhile, LibreOffice's current marketing strategy may succeed in getting governments to offer ODF files and simultaneously sabotage anyone from ever switching to LibreOffice because LibreOffice's own marketing claims it won't work well with Word and Excel files.
OOXML is a terrible format, significantly overcomplicated and implemented by MS Office in such a way as to make alternative implementations fully compatible with it impossible. It's "open" in the name only, burying it would be the only logical step if wide interoperability and using truly open formats is your real goal.
> The push to force Europe switch to ODF only serves to suggest
No, it doesn't only do that. It also suggests the open xml MS Office format is a mess.*
> This is a conversation I have at work, where people laugh when LibreOffice is mentioned and suggest it's incompatible and we can't consider it.
This is evidence your coworkers are misinformed and you can't correct them. It is not proof that the only thing this blog post does is communicate LibreOffice can't handle Microsoft Office docs.
* this is a tale as old as time, I'm 37, remembering reading about this over and over again on /. when I was a young teen. It was part and parcel with Microsoft's antitrust era. The idea was the open format would help avoid antitrust claims, the complaint was the open format was so byzantine as to be effectively closed.
I don't think GP is talking about average users; they seem to be talking about decision-makers in organizations, e.g., a town board that wants to achieve digital independence, but is made unsure by apparent turmoil in the governance in open source orgs...
As somebody else pointed out, I read the entire article and still can't figure out what the author is actually talking about. That said, this sounds an awful lot like the reddit moderator problem: when you rely on unpaid volunteers, they become activist crusaders.
Apparently TDF wanted to host LibreOffice Online for free, when it had previously been a source-only project. Collabora didn't like that as they did 95% of the development and wanted to be able to sell support for their own version, but they didn't want to be competing against TDF's version at the same time.
I can understand Collabora not being jazzed about it, but is there anything in the license that would prevent a third party who is neither Collabora nor TDF from doing the same? I mean, it's one Dockerfile away from anyone doing it, right? May as well be TDF who distributes an official binary.
> 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 was interested in this but the sarcastic and advertorial tone stopped me from getting to the end. It sounds like it describes a real problem but as someone who has not been following the issue it's impossible to separate the facts from the fulmination. I can't tell if something has gone badly wrong with the LibreOffice project or the writer is insinuating as such to promote their own.
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.
Classic pattern. The board gets populated by people whose main skill is board politics, and they use governance tools to push out the people who actually build the thing. Seen this happen in multiple open source foundations.
This is anecdotal at best, but it does play into the tired old technical vs non-technical simplification. The fact that the two entities have now become direct competitors is a better explanation grounded in facts
Your explanation is also an oversimplification that leaves out a lot of key details.
TDF is ran by a board. The board is supposed to contain 10 people, it currently has 7. This board is expected to be elected by members on a regular schedule. The elections are late, because the rump board has twice delayed the elections. Instead of holding elections to fill out the board, the rump board chose to change the bylaws, through a legally questionable process (properly, they would have to hold a vote of trustees, but chose not to), to allow them to exclude people from voting in the elections. Then they use the new bylaws to exclude many of their political opponents, on very flimsy grounds⁰.
You don't need to even consider which side of this conflict is technical or non-technical to see that there is something rotten here.
0: And yes, the grounds are very flimsy indeed. Excluding people in case of active litigation sounds sensible, until you consider that the litigation was started by the TDF board, and is frivolous. Collabra is using the trademarks under valid license.
I don't see it as trying to exclude non technical people, only that people who specialise in organisational politics will have a natural advantage over people who specialise in code so in the long run more of the former will sit on boards
On the other side of things, i've seen plenty of examples where technical people try to manage things despite having no administration experience and screw it up.
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.
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.
> The Community Bylaws require that employees of companies involved in legal disputes with The Document Foundation be removed from TDF membership because, in the past, people made decisions in the interest of their employers rather than in the interest of The Document Foundation.
and
> The Document Foundation could have lost its charitable status, which would have had unforeseen consequences.
I'm not sure why they would have lost charitable status, but that seems like a legitimate concern.
Possibly they don't want corporations on the board that are actively sandbagging an initiative that competes with that corporation's products. But much like the RubyGems fiasco, all the decisions seem very opaque, so I can't say whether that's actually the case.
While anything is possible, we can rest assured that if there was any evidence of subterfuge / sandbagging, given our own involvement in the situation, they would have shared it at some point, surely in their main response.
It seems that way, but it's been flooded with politics for all my adult life. Steve Jackson Games, the Clipper Chip, software patent shenanigans, the public domain stolen from 1976 to 2019, endless thinly-disguised censorship and control efforts - in meatspace, nothing is new.
All I see is a handful of Collabora employees posting different threads that have 0 responses all around the same time?
I'm sorry, but between the sarcastic blog post and now the forum brigading attempt that we're supposed to believe is "rebellion in the forums" this is all just a very sad response from Collabora. You could have just said that Collabora employees wrote some thank-you notes to each other, not tried to bait Hacker News into checking out a "rebellion in the forum"
I still don't understand the details of what happened because the blog post is too thick with sarcasm and insults, but the way Collabora is handling this makes me reflexively sympathetic to the other side for wanting to get away from a team that behaves like this.
Ah - well, with many staff having been kicked out without a word of thanks or apology after, in some cases, decades of work, tens of thousands of commits, and huge amounts of love and effort poured into the project - it is perhaps fitting that a colleague from the Collabora team publicly thanks them for, and acknowledges at least a little of their contribution to LibreOffice. Do have a read.
This is so sad Michael. You gave me an opportunity at Collabora many years ago (I was definitely too inexperienced!) and I’ll never forget this. Collabora is a force for good, and it is sad things have cone to this.
Reading TDF's "side" of the story gives me firm confidence that Collabora was in fact in the right, here. Collabora seems to have the facts on their side, which is why TDF's account here is so vague and passive-aggressive and filled with FUD.
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.
I'm sure there's a reason for the blog post, and the dude name checks himself so I'm sure he's important. But i have no idea what he's on about other than he's mad.
More than that. He was one of the primary external developers back when OpenOffce was at Sun. He was responsible for the go-oo fork due to Sun restrictions and slowness, and was one of (if not the) main reason LibreOffice became its own thing after Sun started sinking.
This is yet another negative article with LiberOffice/TDF at the centre of it (this time with Collabora freely dragging themselves into the muck). This after attacks on OnlyOffice and OpenOffice for, from a relatively external perspective, "existing as competition".
I appreciate that for those "in the trenches" this may be a rallying cry or a shot across the bow, but for the rest of us it is indicating that we keep the whole thing - LibreOffice and Collabora - at arms length. Which is a shame because I've recommended both to people in the past, as well as happily using both at various points myself.
On the contrary, I would take this as evidence that these projects are alive and well - they have people who care enough to try to affect their future trajectory.
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?
From the article: "These days some at TDF seem to emphasize equality instead."
I'm not sure exactly what is meant by that. My guess, having some experience with board-sitter parasites, is they're just appealing to empty principles to create the illusion of being important to the organization, because they're unable or unwilling to make more tangible and substantial contributions.
When somebody can't justify their role with the quality of their work, they look for other justifications instead. Ideological justifications work best because they aren't provable and anybody who questions the value of the supposed ideological contributions can simply be dismissed as being ideologically opposed (see: the sibling comment accusing you of ideological alignment with gamergate, even though libreoffice has nothing to do with gaming.)
For instance, suppose I am a useless parasite who decides to embed myself into the local school board; I have nothing of real value to contribute to such an organization, but maybe I want the role for the clout. Instead of doing something real, I could instead say that my role on the board is to advance the cause of equality. Anybody who says I'm useless can be construed as opposing equality. Anybody who tried to measure the actual equality in the org before and after my arrival can be dismissed because measuring equality is hard to do objectively.
(I learned most of this from a few relatives of mine, who are such board-seeking parasites. By the way, parasite board sitters can use opposition to "woke" in the way they use championing the cause of equality; both cynical empty words used to distract people from the lack of real, substantial and demonstrable contributions. Anybody who complains can be accused of being woke. It works exactly the same regardless of what flavor of disguise the parasite chooses.)
tl;dr Germans and coordination while mitigating takeover risk (ironically)
StarOffice was a German office suite bought by Sun Microsystems in 1999. Sun open-sourced it in 2000 as OpenOffice.org, which became the major free alternative to Microsoft Office through the 2000s. Sun kept significant control. They owned the trademark, required copyright assignment for contributions, and steered the project's direction. Many community contributors were uneasy with this arrangement but tolerated it because Sun was broadly seen as a good-faith actor.
Oracle acquired Sun in 2010. Oracle had a reputation for being far more aggressive about monetizing and controlling its acquisitions (the Java/Google lawsuit being another example). The OpenOffice.org community had already been frustrated by years of slow decision-making and corporate gatekeeping, and Oracle's arrival made the situation feel untenable.
A group of prominent community members and corporate contributors (including people from Red Hat, Novell/SUSE, Canonical, and Google) announced The Document Foundation in Sep 2010 and forked the codebase as LibreOffice. Oracle eventually donated the OpenOffice.org code to Apache but LibreOffice quickly became the version that mattered.
The reason they had to fork was that a single entity (first Sun, then Oracle) had unchecked power over the project. The Document Foundation was explicitly designed to prevent that. If there's no formal structure, whoever controls the servers, the domain name, the trademark, or the build infrastructure effectively controls the project. A foundation with bylaws, elected leadership, and distributed authority makes it much harder for any single company or individual to take the project hostage.
LibreOffice receives donations, employs some staff, holds trademarks, pays for infrastructure, and sponsors events. Under German law (TDF is registered in Berlin), you need a proper legal entity with accountable governance to do this. You can't just have "some developers" holding a bank account and a trademark informally. The foundation was officially incorporated on February 17, 2012.
Because to accomplish anything at scale you need organization. And organizing humans in anything other than forced labor involves respecting them, thus things like codes of conduct. These stories could be about anything and you gamergate veterans will show up grinding one of those axes. Care to throw in wild speculation about whether they use “master” as their main branch name, “slave” as backup database terminology or “allowlist”. You know, any of those things that are keeping America from being great and winning the war.
OpenBSD, a rather more complex project, seems to be doing fine without a code of conduct — in the sense bakugo employed "code of conduct," not in the generalized sensed you conflated it with in your non sequitur.
I find it just the opposite. I can think of few communities nearly as patient or welcoming to anyone who's earnest and willing to put in the work to learn; true, there's no coddling or hand-holding, and, indeed, it tends to be very direct in calling out foolishness or laziness, and can reach epic proportions when it comes to dishonesty or entitlement, but nothing which can't be processed by emotional maturity, nor the gratuitous pedanticism-fueled browbeating often seen in some I-use-foo-btw open-source communities despite their shiny CoCs.
> I find it just the opposite. I can think of few communities nearly as patient or welcoming to anyone who's earnest and willing to put in the work to learn; true, there's no coddling or hand-holding, and, indeed, it tends to be very direct in calling out foolishness or laziness,
That’s nearly the exact opposite of welcoming newbies.
To be perfectly honest, that’s fine: OpenBSD demands a steep learning curve and that you know what you’re doing.
What is? No coddling? Little tolerance toward laziness? Zero toward entitlement? That's closer to the opposite of being patronizing, I would say.
They point to documentation in response to the kind of request I've seen closed with RTFMs elsewhere. They'll expect one to read it, and try one's hand at whatever one is trying to accomplish — and they'll feel slighted by a refusal, given how much work they put into it.
And yet, they go to great, unexpected (given the fame) lengths to help someone actually making the effort; they don't try to put anyone down in order to feel bigger than they are, but they don't sugar coat things to appear more likable either.
In short, no, knowing what one is doing isn't a prerequisite; it's more about not foisting onto others the responsibility for the effort required to move from where one is to where one wants to be — whether in knowledge, maturity or tools.
In this context, what I expanded above as foisting onto others the responsibility for the effort required by what we want to accomplish.
> Why do you believe pointing to the manual is newbie friendly?
To the documentation, which may or may not be a manpage; as it's usually done in response to a request for the information contained therein, I do find it reasonable.
> OpenBSD serves an important niche, but to brand it as newbie-friendly does OpenBSD a disservice.
We're discussing OpenBSD's community, not the system itself.
> Or perhaps you mean newbie tolerant?
I meant what I wrote, that I find the community to be the opposite of "notoriously terrible and unwelcoming to newbies," by which I do not imply newbie-friendliness in a kindergarten sense.
> We're discussing OpenBSD's community, not the system itself.
The community makes the system and decides what’s tolerable. That is to say, the community decides the type of users it expects to serve.
When your own example of laziness is to provide a script and someone fails to run a script; you’re comparing to a time when RTFM was the Linux norm.
But those days where RTFM to newbies were tolerable are long gone.
So OpenBSD was the friendlier community then; it’s a niche and insular community today.
So while I agree it’s not a terrible community, I also wouldn’t say it’s inviting.
> I meant what I wrote, that I find the community to be the opposite of "notoriously terrible and unwelcoming to newbies," by which I do not imply newbie-friendliness in a kindergarten sense.
I mean, it’s not inviting to newbies either; which is the plain reading and understanding of “opposite” of what the OP stated.
Instead it’s “tolerant”, a term which for some reason you don’t seem to like.
I’d ask if you’re Theo, mainly due to the strange back and forth we’re having over semantics and a concern over the OpenBSD community reputation.
> The community makes the system and decides what’s tolerable. That is to say, the community decides the type of users it expects to serve.
Sure, but the community isn't the system; it may inform the direction the system will take, but there isn't a 1:1 equivalence between their respective qualities at any point and across different levels. I made a statement about the OpenBSD community, you implied I was doing a disservice in making such statement about OpenBSD, so I pointed out the distinction.
> When your own example of laziness is to provide a script
We seem to be having different conversations. How did you get "provide a script and someone fails run a script" from "foisting onto others the responsibility for the effort required by what we want to accomplish"?
> So while I agree it’s not a terrible community, I also wouldn’t say it’s inviting.
So... We're mostly on the same page? I opposed someone's claim that it was "notoriously terrible and unwelcoming to newbies." I disagree on both counts. I didn't claim it to be inviting, however, which I find distinct from welcoming: I perceive the former as indicative of an active effort or the desire to attract new members or of is being perceive as attractive from the outside.
> I mean, it’s not inviting to newbies either; which is the plain reading and understanding of “opposite” of what the OP stated.
It's a community that can help a newbie grow in different ways; to increase in knowledge and refine the craft; to be demanding on oneself and to take criticism; so, I find it the opposite of "notoriously terrible."
It accepts anyone interested in learning and willing to make the effort to learn. The community cares about OpenBSD; someone likewise interested in OpenBSD won't be turned always due to politics. So, yes, I find it welcoming.
Is it for everyone? What is? The barbecue club may be the most welcoming place on earth without its being the best fit for a vegetarian.
> Instead it’s “tolerant”, a term which for some reason you don’t seem to like.
I don't see how my preferring my own choice of words over a proposed alternative is indicate of my having something against the latter.
You may want to consider how often, and specially how seriously, you engage with different viewpoints if your first reaction to what looks like is to suppose a mistake and the second is to assume a personal limitation.
> I’d ask if you’re Theo mainly due to the strange back and forth we’re having over semantics and a concern over the OpenBSD community reputation.
Someone commented. I disagreed. You disagreed — on semantics. I expanded. You pushed. And so on. I'm not seeing any of this as some battle for a community's reputation. It's just a discussion.
> Because to accomplish anything at scale you need organization. And organizing humans in anything other than forced labor involves respecting them, thus things like codes of conduct.
This part of your comment was worthwhile. You should have stopped there, before starting to grind an unrelated political axe. Let's at least try to follow the "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity." guideline, eh?
TIL open source projects simply didn't work before a certain (often big tech associated) crowd of non-contributors started forcing bureaucracy and codes of conduct down everyone's throats less than a decade ago.
(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.)
Has to be #1, as the blog makes no mention of age restrictions. Ejecting people for being over 30 would be unheard of outside of Logan's Run! (vintage scifi movie)
When it comes to a governing board that's interested in all the intimate details of an office software suite, I strongly suspect you're not going to find anyone under 30.
> I read that as they’re ejecting all but 30 people.
i had to re-read the original sentence several times to figure out how you came to that conclusion but can see it now: "all people over/above/beyond [a limit of] 30..."
> The project welcomes contributions from true believers in open source. As the majority of people at Collabora are such believers, we expect them to continue contributing when the time comes.
Kids, that's a perfect example of institutionalized passive-aggressive behavior.
It's strange. I started reading about this expecting that I'd support TDF's position against a company with a somewhat dubious open-non-open split, with a reasonable claim about conflict of interest, but the behavior of the TDF side seems sufficiently toxic that it's difficult to support them.
In similar behavior, one of the votes against the community bylaws that seem to have resulted resulted in the expulsions was "If the Board majority group insists on proceeding with this misguided and premature motion, I vote NO". Those in favor decided that the vote was conditional and not valid, because "this motion is neither misguided nor premature". They then proceeded to tell others complaining about the decision that they were violating community standards in doing so.
As far as I can tell, the invalidated vote made no difference to the outcome; it is difficult for me see a legitimate motivation for the interpretation of the vote.
Yeah, it's clear from reading things that there's a lot of personal animosity around all of this, and Italo Vignoli's resignation[1] makes it clear that everyone has mud all over themselves. But that said, it's almost impossible to read that voting exchange[2] as anything other than a deliberate and petty steamrolling of dissent by the current majority. Even being extremely charitable and supposing that the fact that not everyone is native to the english language, it seems impossible to reconcile the decision to not count this vote or record the dissenting comments because it was "unclear" with the supplied evidence that they recorded a similar dissenting "conditional" vote just weeks prior.
Follow on that with the removals from the members list (which as near as I can gather is removing eligible voters from the delayed but mandated upcoming BoD elections). And looking through some of the other recent discussion, if the TDF majority group was hoping to come out of this looking like they're on the side of angels, they might want to get a refund on those tarnished halos.
It's like they're setting themselves up for a "no true Scotsman" argument. Anybody who disagrees with their decisions isn't a "true believer" in open source.
Based on that table it looks like “LibreOffice the name” ejected “LibreOffice the software development project” basically. Although, it isn’t really a corporate takeover, right? There was one company that was doing most of the work, now they’ve been ejected.
I don’t think LibreOffice ever really took over the mindspace of OpenOffice anyway. Maybe they can a more distinct split will give it a more independent identity.
Since Collabora already has an online version, maybe they should fork completely and call this offline version something that implies independence. So, I suggest: SolOffice. Haha.
I checked the numbers. OpenOffice reports about 230,000 downloads a week. LibreOffice, in contrast, reports about 1,000,000 downloads a week. Those are both direct downloads from their respective websites, thus not counting Linux distributions, in which the default office suite is LibreOffice. AFAIK, no distribution comes with OpenOffice as its default; it's always LibreOffice.
I also checked Google Trends for the last 3 months, comparing LibreOffice vs OpenOffice. The first is searched on average 4.7 times more than the latter, which tracks with weekly download numbers.
From those numbers, I'd say it's pretty clear the name "LibreOffice" won quite decisively over "OpenOffice". OpenOffice is still used a lot, but nowhere close to LibreOffice, especially when we add Linux distributions counts.
> I don’t think LibreOffice ever really took over the mindspace of OpenOffice anyway.
It was really a terrible name if you're going after normie office workers. Nobody outside of open source people knows what "Libre" means or even how to pronounce it.
I'm pretty sure most "normies" who are at all aware of what MS Office is, and what, if any, of its alternatives are, still use OpenOffice and think that it is the no-cost office suite. LibreOffice already has problems with brand recognition, last thing we need is another fork.
LibreOffice is a pretty bad name, it is too clearly a spin-off of OpenOffice and never really gained its own identity. Being identifiable as a bad project’s better fork is kind of a weak starting position.
That's pointing the underlying cultural issue. Taking the name for the thing it provided at some point, and consider it as unquestionable proxy to world view expected to be itself eternally static.
Not only our representation of the world is wrong, but world evolves possibly faster than cognitive abilities can keep track of without the minimum effort which is driving out of comfort zone.
LibreOffice exists because the devs of OpenOffice forked it. If the project leadership now ejects the devs, I think that the new fork will be the living one.
"The Document Foundation" for anyone too lazy to look it up.
It has been a while since I've noticed a high-profile OSS schism; for anyone who isn't used to them, this is how communities behave. They're generally healthy as long as the stakes aren't too high. In a lighter moment, I might also call on TDF to expel any vim users too in the hope that they'll take the hint and switch to a more C-x aligned editor.
(Pun explainer: silent s, so it sounds like the cycling event. Meaning Towers of France - tour means both tower and tour[en] in French, only their grammatical gender is different)
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-...
Full circle indeed, nice historical capsule thanks
OK here's my understanding:
- LibreOfficeOnLine (LOOL) was created within The Document Foundation (TDF) but largely developed by Collabora. It was source only and suggested users pay a company to host for them.
- Some within TDF wanted to offer LOOL as a binary offering.
- Collabora moved their contributions to Collabora Online, which they controlled.
- LOOL was archived.
- More recently, LOOL was revived
- Collabora is pissed
- Collabora gets booted from TDF
I suppose this is a fundamental issue with the model of a foundation "owning" a product but a separate for profit company doing all the work. There's always going to be some issue that the two sides disagree on (in this case, how the free version is distributed). The foundation then either has to give in*, and become irrelevant or stand up for their own position, in which case the company is basically forced to pull out their co-operation. It seems unlikely that TDF will be able to make any product progress, and I bet in a few years collabora gets what they want and returns to the fold. TDF will either be cowed forever or this situation will just repeat on the next conflict.
* Like with OpenAI, where the for-benefit part eventually capitulated and became an vestigial organ of a for-profit business.
Collabora was unhappy about the LOOL revival, but not enough to leave.
It was only when TDF contrived reasons to expel Collabora people that Collabora decided to leave.
(Full Disclosure: I am one of the Collabora people expelled)
So what were the contrived reasons? I navigated getting coolwsd built before, but never quite got my user management layer for Nextcloud perfected to the point of going live... I thought it was a good piece of kit, but was a little bit skeptical of the branding divergence at the time. Something about it kinda just felt like drama waiting to happen. Was that it do you think? Or something else. Will keep an eye on the project regardless.
TDF cites a lawsuit between TDF and Collabora, causing all Collabora employees being removed from the TDF board (not community). Which makes sense.
https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/04/01/comment-...
"...being removed from the TDF board"
Not from the board, (implies board of directors), but from TDF membership (board of trustees). This essentially means you have no voting power and no benefits, but you're still free to still contribute by fixing bugs, adding new features, mentoring, code review,... ("community"). This are all the things that would benefit TDF by getting more money from donations (and then use that money for useful things that are mentioned in this TDF blog post).
Oh shit, I’m so sorry Noel. That’s awful!
Please do read TDF's side of the story as well: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/04/01/comment-...
I read it, and was hoping I would be more sympathetic to their side, but it was essentially 'they violated the rules our newly added non-contributor board members set, and by those rules, we kicked them out'.
Essentially this 100% confirms the Collabora story, just elaborates a bit on how the administrative takeover was done.
Interestingly, the latest board minutes has a redacted section about a legal situation?
> [REDACTED: 43 lines of discussion about the current legal situation]
https://community.documentfoundation.org/t/board-of-director...
edit: And lots of back and forth regarding reviving LibreOffice Online here: https://community.documentfoundation.org/t/vote-revoke-votes...
Seems messy
I wish we would admit that you can't have it all. You can't have a product that is open source with neutral foundation governance and also have that same product be de facto proprietary. People have been pushing this bait-and-switch business model for too long.
Conversely, I feel like a company with a cracker jack support team to match their sales team could profitably sell support for ALSA if they wanted to.
ALSA?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Linux_Sound_Architect...
(presumably)
Thanks. I thought this was superseded a long time ago, but apparently the newer sound architectures build on top of it.
It was not really proprietary though? I don't like Collabora Office at all as a product (sorry, and I have tried) and the branding situation is super messy (sorry but it's true) but all the code is online.
The company in question profits heavily from the open source nature of LibreOffice. They're a big government vendor in Europe, mainly because their codebase is perceived as open source.
Pro tip: If you're trying to raise awareness of an issue that's important to you, don't lard up your exposition with sarcasm, insider references and incomprehensible innuendo. If all you manage to communicate is that you're unhappy, people may feel sorry for you but they won't know why.
Say what you mean in plain language; explain the issues and why they matter, and let your readers come to their own conclusions.
I'm sorry it's confusing, perhaps an attempt to add humor to a bleak and dramatic change in the LibreOffice project has made it less than clear. The bald facts are fairly simple: The Document Foundation, now ~controlled by its non-programmer staff just ejected its main core code contributors based on complicated and apparently contrived reasons. Lots of non-profits get bogged down in pointless in-fighting that eats away at their purpose sadly.
Hey Michael, that's alright but can you perhaps edit the article to have all the facts clear out there in the manner that Markus has said.
There are times to be satirical, don't get me wrong, but those are usually when the dust is settled and maybe a reminiscence on the past.
Have a nice day and I hope that something positive comes out of all of it. I always believe that there are only few projects which get to the eyes of the general public enough to get funded, LibreOffice is one of the very few. People trust Libreoffice with donations and money to fight against Microsoft and show a path of freedom.
For the document foundation to betray the people who programmed the code in the first place, is also, a betrayal of the people who have funded libreoffice for years, who would love to demand more answers and I hope that in the article, that you can talk _effectively_ to them. It's really sad to see all of this happen and I wish if something happens as I don't wish for people to lose hope in open source foundations with cases like these.
What are the complicated apparently contrived reasons?
It's not at all clear from the article.
All I really got from the article is "collabora are banned from contributing to open office, and aren't happy about it". What reason did they give? What's the actual reason you think it is (you mention things are contrived, so I assume there's another reason you think)? What's the libre office online stuff got to do with it?
All of this is unclear from the article.
Collabora is not banned from contributions. It's banned from the board, because of a lawsuit between those two.
What the lawsuit is about would be interesting.
This exactly sums up my read of this. I have no idea what is going on but it appears to impact a thing I use in my nextcloud so I should possibly care, but damned if I have any idea what is going on here.
I think you meant OnlyOffice(?) it seems like there is also some turbulence and you will soon be migrated to a fork(?)
https://alternativeto.net/news/2026/4/onlyoffice-ends-its-pa...
It's called CODE in nextcloud which stands for Collabra Online Development Edition and it is integrated in nextcloud. It isbfor sure a thing. Don't try to confuse me more lol.
> required branding, logos
I'm no lawyer but I don't think the AGPL says you must use the same branding in a fork, in fact most hard forks tend to prefer changing it in my experience, as the original branding might be trademarked and so they can't legally use it themselves without permission, and/or they just want to distance themselves further from the parent.
> people may feel sorry for you but they won't know why.
Or worse, they'll just think you're a jerk and not feel sorry for you.
Agreed, I found this article hard to follow and emotive in a way that made it feel extremely biased.
And, even more importantly, don't post it on April Fools Day! Delay gratification for 24 hours.
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.
(Thanks - we'll merge the threads)
I have a feeling that the Open Document Foundation is going to end up being the loser here. Collabora is the entity that can fund development with a commercial offering. It sounds like they employ the core contributors to the project as well.
Regardless of who "wins," I'm just here to say that I like OnlyOffice a lot better and switched away from LibreOffice. I like that it just looks more like a modern program and overall feels less clunky.
Make sure to backup regularly. I don't know how good OnlyOffice is these days, but it definitely has (had?) a terrible history of quality control. We migrated off it a couple of years ago after losing several days of work due to severe (and, as it turned out, widely known) bugs in how it handled changes/document version tracking.
I only work with local files and I’m really not doing anything mission critical. Employer has the Microsoft office license. I just need a free thing to open the occasional thing.
OnlyOffice is not really open source. They say they are but they also add impossible conditions to their license. (you are forced to use their logo, but you are also not allowed to use their logo.)
It’s also a Russian company in Russia.
That doesn’t bother me. I’m just looking for a free office program that runs offline and works well.
It looks like the Euro Office suite will improve upon it when it launches and remove the remaining downsides to it.
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.
I'm confident the person who most wants to sabotage LibreOffice's success is Italo Vignoli. He's involved in this issue as well, but the other core problem is his marketing strategy: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/author/italovignoli...
Most of his blogs are about how awful OOXML (Microsoft Office's open standard) formats are, and that everyone needs to switch to ODF (his preferred open standard).
What people don't want to use is products which don't work with everyone else's. LibreOffice works with Microsoft Office files really well, but for some reason Italo doesn't want you to know that. He wants the entire world to switch formats to LibreOffice's formats, but really that's just telling potential business users LibreOffice can't meet their needs... interacting with the existing monopoly of Microsoft Office users.
This is a self-sabotaging marketing approach. LibreOffice needs to be promoting itself as an excellent drop-in replacement for Microsoft Office which will easily interoperate with every other organization's office applications, regardless of format.
He's using this approach because the EU requires documents to be in an open format, and by him advocating that OOXML is only open by name, he can advance a legal argument that OpenDocument is the only acceptable format.
Office supports OpenDocument.l, it just doesn't use it by default.
I understand his approach but it's a dumb approach. OOXML is plenty open, proven by the fact LibreOffice works with it fine. The push to force Europe switch to ODF only serves to suggest LibreOffice isn't capable of replacing Microsoft Office (in a world where most other organizations use Office). This is a conversation I have at work, where people laugh when LibreOffice is mentioned and suggest it's incompatible and we can't consider it.
A far better marketing strategy would be to loudly announce, continually, that LibreOffice is the best software for handling Office files and ODF alike! And as people switch to LibreOffice and it defaults to ODF, that naturally grows.
Meanwhile, LibreOffice's current marketing strategy may succeed in getting governments to offer ODF files and simultaneously sabotage anyone from ever switching to LibreOffice because LibreOffice's own marketing claims it won't work well with Word and Excel files.
OOXML is a terrible format, significantly overcomplicated and implemented by MS Office in such a way as to make alternative implementations fully compatible with it impossible. It's "open" in the name only, burying it would be the only logical step if wide interoperability and using truly open formats is your real goal.
And Italo's bad marketing strategy will only ensure OOXML wins. That's what you're missing, it's just a bad way to make the case or foster change.
> The push to force Europe switch to ODF only serves to suggest
No, it doesn't only do that. It also suggests the open xml MS Office format is a mess.*
> This is a conversation I have at work, where people laugh when LibreOffice is mentioned and suggest it's incompatible and we can't consider it.
This is evidence your coworkers are misinformed and you can't correct them. It is not proof that the only thing this blog post does is communicate LibreOffice can't handle Microsoft Office docs.
* this is a tale as old as time, I'm 37, remembering reading about this over and over again on /. when I was a young teen. It was part and parcel with Microsoft's antitrust era. The idea was the open format would help avoid antitrust claims, the complaint was the open format was so byzantine as to be effectively closed.
> People won't want to use products with so much drama and uncertainty.
Really? You think the average user cares about this drama?
Businesses and governments do, and they're both the target market and the drivers behind digital sovereignty efforts.
I don't think GP is talking about average users; they seem to be talking about decision-makers in organizations, e.g., a town board that wants to achieve digital independence, but is made unsure by apparent turmoil in the governance in open source orgs...
Really? You think the average user is a TDF user?
Hah. Anyone with some tokens to burn can compose a report on the data?
TDF apparently refers to The Document Foundation, the foundation behind things like LibreOffice.
As somebody else pointed out, I read the entire article and still can't figure out what the author is actually talking about. That said, this sounds an awful lot like the reddit moderator problem: when you rely on unpaid volunteers, they become activist crusaders.
I'm assuming this is related to the previous drama back in 2020:
https://lwn.net/Articles/833233/
Apparently TDF wanted to host LibreOffice Online for free, when it had previously been a source-only project. Collabora didn't like that as they did 95% of the development and wanted to be able to sell support for their own version, but they didn't want to be competing against TDF's version at the same time.
I can understand Collabora not being jazzed about it, but is there anything in the license that would prevent a third party who is neither Collabora nor TDF from doing the same? I mean, it's one Dockerfile away from anyone doing it, right? May as well be TDF who distributes an official binary.
I don't think so, I think it's more about TDF considering their involvement at that point a conflict of interest.
> 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 was interested in this but the sarcastic and advertorial tone stopped me from getting to the end. It sounds like it describes a real problem but as someone who has not been following the issue it's impossible to separate the facts from the fulmination. I can't tell if something has gone badly wrong with the LibreOffice project or the writer is insinuating as such to promote their own.
TDF is https://www.documentfoundation.org
Saving you all a click. “The Document Foundation”, which seems to be the entity governing libreoffice?
This is ironic timing given the OnlyOffice/Euro-Office drama https://www.heise.de/en/news/Euro-Office-OnlyOffice-accuses-...
Microsoft really has nothing to fear ...
Why is that?
Office is still a core product, is it not?
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.
Classic pattern. The board gets populated by people whose main skill is board politics, and they use governance tools to push out the people who actually build the thing. Seen this happen in multiple open source foundations.
This is anecdotal at best, but it does play into the tired old technical vs non-technical simplification. The fact that the two entities have now become direct competitors is a better explanation grounded in facts
Your explanation is also an oversimplification that leaves out a lot of key details.
TDF is ran by a board. The board is supposed to contain 10 people, it currently has 7. This board is expected to be elected by members on a regular schedule. The elections are late, because the rump board has twice delayed the elections. Instead of holding elections to fill out the board, the rump board chose to change the bylaws, through a legally questionable process (properly, they would have to hold a vote of trustees, but chose not to), to allow them to exclude people from voting in the elections. Then they use the new bylaws to exclude many of their political opponents, on very flimsy grounds⁰.
You don't need to even consider which side of this conflict is technical or non-technical to see that there is something rotten here.
0: And yes, the grounds are very flimsy indeed. Excluding people in case of active litigation sounds sensible, until you consider that the litigation was started by the TDF board, and is frivolous. Collabra is using the trademarks under valid license.
Fair points, I didn’t know about the legal tango from the TDF, circumventing processes to impose yourself is not the tool of the righteous usually
I don't see it as trying to exclude non technical people, only that people who specialise in organisational politics will have a natural advantage over people who specialise in code so in the long run more of the former will sit on boards
On the other side of things, i've seen plenty of examples where technical people try to manage things despite having no administration experience and screw it up.
That sounds like what happened at Boeing.
I might not be the target audience here but reading this I'm having trouble understanding what actually happened and why.
Is there any other article that actually details what is going on? I feel whiplash from reading this right after the Ruby Central fiasco.
You can read TDF's position: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/04/01/comment-...
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.
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.
From their blog: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/04/01/comment-...
> The Community Bylaws require that employees of companies involved in legal disputes with The Document Foundation be removed from TDF membership because, in the past, people made decisions in the interest of their employers rather than in the interest of The Document Foundation.
and
> The Document Foundation could have lost its charitable status, which would have had unforeseen consequences.
I'm not sure why they would have lost charitable status, but that seems like a legitimate concern.
They’re relaunching Libre Office online apparently, they don’t want competitors on their board I’m guessing
Possibly they don't want corporations on the board that are actively sandbagging an initiative that competes with that corporation's products. But much like the RubyGems fiasco, all the decisions seem very opaque, so I can't say whether that's actually the case.
While anything is possible, we can rest assured that if there was any evidence of subterfuge / sandbagging, given our own involvement in the situation, they would have shared it at some point, surely in their main response.
Haha, imagine it Apache would merge LibreOffice back to OpenOffice, and developers also switched. Would be the circle of the decade.
On a different note, this industry used to have so much more fun - just solving puzzles to herd bits - before it was flooded by politics.
It seems that way, but it's been flooded with politics for all my adult life. Steve Jackson Games, the Clipper Chip, software patent shenanigans, the public domain stolen from 1976 to 2019, endless thinly-disguised censorship and control efforts - in meatspace, nothing is new.
> On a different note, this industry used to have so much more fun - just solving puzzles to herd bits - before it was flooded by politics.
when was that, in the 80s?
1880s?
Not even then...
I mean, there was that whole drama between Edison and Tesla...
https://community.documentfoundation.org/c/board-discuss/26
Looks like there is rebellion in the forums...
All I see is a handful of Collabora employees posting different threads that have 0 responses all around the same time?
I'm sorry, but between the sarcastic blog post and now the forum brigading attempt that we're supposed to believe is "rebellion in the forums" this is all just a very sad response from Collabora. You could have just said that Collabora employees wrote some thank-you notes to each other, not tried to bait Hacker News into checking out a "rebellion in the forum"
I still don't understand the details of what happened because the blog post is too thick with sarcasm and insults, but the way Collabora is handling this makes me reflexively sympathetic to the other side for wanting to get away from a team that behaves like this.
Ah - well, with many staff having been kicked out without a word of thanks or apology after, in some cases, decades of work, tens of thousands of commits, and huge amounts of love and effort poured into the project - it is perhaps fitting that a colleague from the Collabora team publicly thanks them for, and acknowledges at least a little of their contribution to LibreOffice. Do have a read.
This is so sad Michael. You gave me an opportunity at Collabora many years ago (I was definitely too inexperienced!) and I’ll never forget this. Collabora is a force for good, and it is sad things have cone to this.
Huh, I didn't realize it was time for Open Office's descendants to collapse and divide again.
Open-office mitosis is one of the most beautiful and natural parts of the Open Source ecosystem.
Everyone, please also read TDF's side of the story, before speculating: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/04/01/comment-...
Reading TDF's "side" of the story gives me firm confidence that Collabora was in fact in the right, here. Collabora seems to have the facts on their side, which is why TDF's account here is so vague and passive-aggressive and filled with FUD.
Comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47604892 (in particular, the mention that Collabora was not in fact intending to leave) lend further credence.
The Open Road to Freedom comic at Collabora is making more and more sense.
https://www.collaboraonline.com/torf-index/
The (top-level only) adversaries in this unfortunate drama:
https://www.documentfoundation.org/board/
https://www.collaboraonline.com/about-us/
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 related in the sense that the EU push to free software office is what precipitated all this drama.
I'm sure there's a reason for the blog post, and the dude name checks himself so I'm sure he's important. But i have no idea what he's on about other than he's mad.
He's a longtime OpenOffice/LibreOffice and now, I guess, CollabraOffice contributor.
More than that. He was one of the primary external developers back when OpenOffce was at Sun. He was responsible for the go-oo fork due to Sun restrictions and slowness, and was one of (if not the) main reason LibreOffice became its own thing after Sun started sinking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Meeks_(software_develo...
This is yet another negative article with LiberOffice/TDF at the centre of it (this time with Collabora freely dragging themselves into the muck). This after attacks on OnlyOffice and OpenOffice for, from a relatively external perspective, "existing as competition".
I appreciate that for those "in the trenches" this may be a rallying cry or a shot across the bow, but for the rest of us it is indicating that we keep the whole thing - LibreOffice and Collabora - at arms length. Which is a shame because I've recommended both to people in the past, as well as happily using both at various points myself.
On the contrary, I would take this as evidence that these projects are alive and well - they have people who care enough to try to affect their future trajectory.
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?
From the article: "These days some at TDF seem to emphasize equality instead."
I'm not sure exactly what is meant by that. My guess, having some experience with board-sitter parasites, is they're just appealing to empty principles to create the illusion of being important to the organization, because they're unable or unwilling to make more tangible and substantial contributions.
When somebody can't justify their role with the quality of their work, they look for other justifications instead. Ideological justifications work best because they aren't provable and anybody who questions the value of the supposed ideological contributions can simply be dismissed as being ideologically opposed (see: the sibling comment accusing you of ideological alignment with gamergate, even though libreoffice has nothing to do with gaming.)
For instance, suppose I am a useless parasite who decides to embed myself into the local school board; I have nothing of real value to contribute to such an organization, but maybe I want the role for the clout. Instead of doing something real, I could instead say that my role on the board is to advance the cause of equality. Anybody who says I'm useless can be construed as opposing equality. Anybody who tried to measure the actual equality in the org before and after my arrival can be dismissed because measuring equality is hard to do objectively.
(I learned most of this from a few relatives of mine, who are such board-seeking parasites. By the way, parasite board sitters can use opposition to "woke" in the way they use championing the cause of equality; both cynical empty words used to distract people from the lack of real, substantial and demonstrable contributions. Anybody who complains can be accused of being woke. It works exactly the same regardless of what flavor of disguise the parasite chooses.)
These parasitic patterns are also visible in lower management levels, not only boards (not disputing your point, just adding to it).
Yes absolutely.
That line stuck out to me at first but it's clear from the context thus far:
Up until the 2024 board election, the organization ran on meritocracy in the sense that those who contributed the most had the most say.
Equality means here that the organization shifted to everyone present having an equal voice. It was no longer proportional to the work contributed.
tl;dr Germans and coordination while mitigating takeover risk (ironically)
StarOffice was a German office suite bought by Sun Microsystems in 1999. Sun open-sourced it in 2000 as OpenOffice.org, which became the major free alternative to Microsoft Office through the 2000s. Sun kept significant control. They owned the trademark, required copyright assignment for contributions, and steered the project's direction. Many community contributors were uneasy with this arrangement but tolerated it because Sun was broadly seen as a good-faith actor.
Oracle acquired Sun in 2010. Oracle had a reputation for being far more aggressive about monetizing and controlling its acquisitions (the Java/Google lawsuit being another example). The OpenOffice.org community had already been frustrated by years of slow decision-making and corporate gatekeeping, and Oracle's arrival made the situation feel untenable.
A group of prominent community members and corporate contributors (including people from Red Hat, Novell/SUSE, Canonical, and Google) announced The Document Foundation in Sep 2010 and forked the codebase as LibreOffice. Oracle eventually donated the OpenOffice.org code to Apache but LibreOffice quickly became the version that mattered.
The reason they had to fork was that a single entity (first Sun, then Oracle) had unchecked power over the project. The Document Foundation was explicitly designed to prevent that. If there's no formal structure, whoever controls the servers, the domain name, the trademark, or the build infrastructure effectively controls the project. A foundation with bylaws, elected leadership, and distributed authority makes it much harder for any single company or individual to take the project hostage.
LibreOffice receives donations, employs some staff, holds trademarks, pays for infrastructure, and sponsors events. Under German law (TDF is registered in Berlin), you need a proper legal entity with accountable governance to do this. You can't just have "some developers" holding a bank account and a trademark informally. The foundation was officially incorporated on February 17, 2012.
Because to accomplish anything at scale you need organization. And organizing humans in anything other than forced labor involves respecting them, thus things like codes of conduct. These stories could be about anything and you gamergate veterans will show up grinding one of those axes. Care to throw in wild speculation about whether they use “master” as their main branch name, “slave” as backup database terminology or “allowlist”. You know, any of those things that are keeping America from being great and winning the war.
OpenBSD, a rather more complex project, seems to be doing fine without a code of conduct — in the sense bakugo employed "code of conduct," not in the generalized sensed you conflated it with in your non sequitur.
I mean, I like openbsd the product, but the community culture is notoriously terrible and unwelcoming to newbies.
I find it just the opposite. I can think of few communities nearly as patient or welcoming to anyone who's earnest and willing to put in the work to learn; true, there's no coddling or hand-holding, and, indeed, it tends to be very direct in calling out foolishness or laziness, and can reach epic proportions when it comes to dishonesty or entitlement, but nothing which can't be processed by emotional maturity, nor the gratuitous pedanticism-fueled browbeating often seen in some I-use-foo-btw open-source communities despite their shiny CoCs.
> I find it just the opposite. I can think of few communities nearly as patient or welcoming to anyone who's earnest and willing to put in the work to learn; true, there's no coddling or hand-holding, and, indeed, it tends to be very direct in calling out foolishness or laziness,
That’s nearly the exact opposite of welcoming newbies.
To be perfectly honest, that’s fine: OpenBSD demands a steep learning curve and that you know what you’re doing.
What is? No coddling? Little tolerance toward laziness? Zero toward entitlement? That's closer to the opposite of being patronizing, I would say.
They point to documentation in response to the kind of request I've seen closed with RTFMs elsewhere. They'll expect one to read it, and try one's hand at whatever one is trying to accomplish — and they'll feel slighted by a refusal, given how much work they put into it.
And yet, they go to great, unexpected (given the fame) lengths to help someone actually making the effort; they don't try to put anyone down in order to feel bigger than they are, but they don't sugar coat things to appear more likable either.
In short, no, knowing what one is doing isn't a prerequisite; it's more about not foisting onto others the responsibility for the effort required to move from where one is to where one wants to be — whether in knowledge, maturity or tools.
What do you consider laziness?
Why do you believe pointing to the manual is newbie friendly?
In the Linux world, it took ages before it was newbie friendly (thinking Ubuntu and Mint).
OpenBSD serves an important niche, but to brand it as newbie-friendly does OpenBSD a disservice.
Or perhaps you mean newbie tolerant?
> What do you consider laziness?
In this context, what I expanded above as foisting onto others the responsibility for the effort required by what we want to accomplish.
> Why do you believe pointing to the manual is newbie friendly?
To the documentation, which may or may not be a manpage; as it's usually done in response to a request for the information contained therein, I do find it reasonable.
> OpenBSD serves an important niche, but to brand it as newbie-friendly does OpenBSD a disservice.
We're discussing OpenBSD's community, not the system itself.
> Or perhaps you mean newbie tolerant?
I meant what I wrote, that I find the community to be the opposite of "notoriously terrible and unwelcoming to newbies," by which I do not imply newbie-friendliness in a kindergarten sense.
> We're discussing OpenBSD's community, not the system itself.
The community makes the system and decides what’s tolerable. That is to say, the community decides the type of users it expects to serve.
When your own example of laziness is to provide a script and someone fails to run a script; you’re comparing to a time when RTFM was the Linux norm. But those days where RTFM to newbies were tolerable are long gone.
So OpenBSD was the friendlier community then; it’s a niche and insular community today.
So while I agree it’s not a terrible community, I also wouldn’t say it’s inviting.
> I meant what I wrote, that I find the community to be the opposite of "notoriously terrible and unwelcoming to newbies," by which I do not imply newbie-friendliness in a kindergarten sense.
I mean, it’s not inviting to newbies either; which is the plain reading and understanding of “opposite” of what the OP stated.
Instead it’s “tolerant”, a term which for some reason you don’t seem to like.
I’d ask if you’re Theo, mainly due to the strange back and forth we’re having over semantics and a concern over the OpenBSD community reputation.
> The community makes the system and decides what’s tolerable. That is to say, the community decides the type of users it expects to serve.
Sure, but the community isn't the system; it may inform the direction the system will take, but there isn't a 1:1 equivalence between their respective qualities at any point and across different levels. I made a statement about the OpenBSD community, you implied I was doing a disservice in making such statement about OpenBSD, so I pointed out the distinction.
> When your own example of laziness is to provide a script
We seem to be having different conversations. How did you get "provide a script and someone fails run a script" from "foisting onto others the responsibility for the effort required by what we want to accomplish"?
> So while I agree it’s not a terrible community, I also wouldn’t say it’s inviting.
So... We're mostly on the same page? I opposed someone's claim that it was "notoriously terrible and unwelcoming to newbies." I disagree on both counts. I didn't claim it to be inviting, however, which I find distinct from welcoming: I perceive the former as indicative of an active effort or the desire to attract new members or of is being perceive as attractive from the outside.
> I mean, it’s not inviting to newbies either; which is the plain reading and understanding of “opposite” of what the OP stated.
It's a community that can help a newbie grow in different ways; to increase in knowledge and refine the craft; to be demanding on oneself and to take criticism; so, I find it the opposite of "notoriously terrible."
It accepts anyone interested in learning and willing to make the effort to learn. The community cares about OpenBSD; someone likewise interested in OpenBSD won't be turned always due to politics. So, yes, I find it welcoming.
Is it for everyone? What is? The barbecue club may be the most welcoming place on earth without its being the best fit for a vegetarian.
> Instead it’s “tolerant”, a term which for some reason you don’t seem to like.
I don't see how my preferring my own choice of words over a proposed alternative is indicate of my having something against the latter.
You may want to consider how often, and specially how seriously, you engage with different viewpoints if your first reaction to what looks like is to suppose a mistake and the second is to assume a personal limitation.
> I’d ask if you’re Theo mainly due to the strange back and forth we’re having over semantics and a concern over the OpenBSD community reputation.
Someone commented. I disagreed. You disagreed — on semantics. I expanded. You pushed. And so on. I'm not seeing any of this as some battle for a community's reputation. It's just a discussion.
OpenBSD has a "netiquette" doc for its mailing lists: https://www.openbsd.org/mail.html
Not sure if you want to count it as a "code of conduct", but it certainly defines rules on how to communicate and contribute to the project.
I'd count it as one in the general sense I'd count the style(9) manpage as another, not in the specific sense I indicated I was referring to:
> ... fine without a code of conduct — in the sense bakugo employed "code of conduct," not in the generalized sense ...
> Because to accomplish anything at scale you need organization. And organizing humans in anything other than forced labor involves respecting them, thus things like codes of conduct.
This part of your comment was worthwhile. You should have stopped there, before starting to grind an unrelated political axe. Let's at least try to follow the "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity." guideline, eh?
There are many open source projects out there that accomplished many things on an insane scale that are driven by single developers
Or do you mean scale of organization?
Organisation can take many form. Hierarchy and bureaucracy are two possible applicable categories in that domain.
TIL open source projects simply didn't work before a certain (often big tech associated) crowd of non-contributors started forcing bureaucracy and codes of conduct down everyone's throats less than a decade ago.
> Because to accomplish anything at scale you need organization.
I guess the question is does the size of the organization match the scale of what they want to accomplish?
The same day that OnlyOffice ended its 8-year partnership with Nextcloud, no less.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47605831
Are the people responsible for the "LibreOffice Personal Edition" the ones ejected or the ones staying?
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.)
Has to be #1, as the blog makes no mention of age restrictions. Ejecting people for being over 30 would be unheard of outside of Logan's Run! (vintage scifi movie)
When it comes to a governing board that's interested in all the intimate details of an office software suite, I strongly suspect you're not going to find anyone under 30.
I read that as they’re ejecting all but 30 people.
> I read that as they’re ejecting all but 30 people.
i had to re-read the original sentence several times to figure out how you came to that conclusion but can see it now: "all people over/above/beyond [a limit of] 30..."
It's really hard to parse and I'm just guessing at what it means. Now when I glance at it again, I read it like:
> their Membership Committee has decided to eject from membership all Collabora staff and partners (over thirty people) who...
I don't know if that's correct, either.
I don't have enough background to know if this is an April Fool's joke or not?
It's the "tyranny of structure"
Followed by Arrow's impossibility theorem, and we have our cycle
Euro office looking very suspicious here
Euro Office and OnlyOffice drama is not directly related to this office drama.
A different drama
Any word on why this happened? TFA just says it happened and was bad, with no even nominal explanation of why TDF did this.
> The project welcomes contributions from true believers in open source. As the majority of people at Collabora are such believers, we expect them to continue contributing when the time comes.
Kids, that's a perfect example of institutionalized passive-aggressive behavior.
It's strange. I started reading about this expecting that I'd support TDF's position against a company with a somewhat dubious open-non-open split, with a reasonable claim about conflict of interest, but the behavior of the TDF side seems sufficiently toxic that it's difficult to support them.
In similar behavior, one of the votes against the community bylaws that seem to have resulted resulted in the expulsions was "If the Board majority group insists on proceeding with this misguided and premature motion, I vote NO". Those in favor decided that the vote was conditional and not valid, because "this motion is neither misguided nor premature". They then proceeded to tell others complaining about the decision that they were violating community standards in doing so.
As far as I can tell, the invalidated vote made no difference to the outcome; it is difficult for me see a legitimate motivation for the interpretation of the vote.
Yeah, it's clear from reading things that there's a lot of personal animosity around all of this, and Italo Vignoli's resignation[1] makes it clear that everyone has mud all over themselves. But that said, it's almost impossible to read that voting exchange[2] as anything other than a deliberate and petty steamrolling of dissent by the current majority. Even being extremely charitable and supposing that the fact that not everyone is native to the english language, it seems impossible to reconcile the decision to not count this vote or record the dissenting comments because it was "unclear" with the supplied evidence that they recorded a similar dissenting "conditional" vote just weeks prior.
Follow on that with the removals from the members list (which as near as I can gather is removing eligible voters from the delayed but mandated upcoming BoD elections). And looking through some of the other recent discussion, if the TDF majority group was hoping to come out of this looking like they're on the side of angels, they might want to get a refund on those tarnished halos.
[1]: https://community.documentfoundation.org/t/sorry-but-i-give-...
[2]: https://community.documentfoundation.org/t/vote-adopt-versio...
Yeah, that seems like an odd thing to say.
It's like they're setting themselves up for a "no true Scotsman" argument. Anybody who disagrees with their decisions isn't a "true believer" in open source.
So essentially 'we f**ked you over but we still expect you to do the work'?
For free!
Wow that list of commits is brutal. Libre Office is dead. Just another corporate take over of an open source project.
Based on that table it looks like “LibreOffice the name” ejected “LibreOffice the software development project” basically. Although, it isn’t really a corporate takeover, right? There was one company that was doing most of the work, now they’ve been ejected.
So why not just fork it under a new name.
> So why not just fork it under a new name.
Again? Sigh. Isn't that how we got LibreOffice in the first place? (From OpenOffice.)
I don’t think LibreOffice ever really took over the mindspace of OpenOffice anyway. Maybe they can a more distinct split will give it a more independent identity.
Since Collabora already has an online version, maybe they should fork completely and call this offline version something that implies independence. So, I suggest: SolOffice. Haha.
I checked the numbers. OpenOffice reports about 230,000 downloads a week. LibreOffice, in contrast, reports about 1,000,000 downloads a week. Those are both direct downloads from their respective websites, thus not counting Linux distributions, in which the default office suite is LibreOffice. AFAIK, no distribution comes with OpenOffice as its default; it's always LibreOffice.
I also checked Google Trends for the last 3 months, comparing LibreOffice vs OpenOffice. The first is searched on average 4.7 times more than the latter, which tracks with weekly download numbers.
From those numbers, I'd say it's pretty clear the name "LibreOffice" won quite decisively over "OpenOffice". OpenOffice is still used a lot, but nowhere close to LibreOffice, especially when we add Linux distributions counts.
You have to ask yourself how does a dead project yield 230k downloads a week?
OpenOffice is by far the better name and has a potential brand recognition that LibreOffice never will.
> I don’t think LibreOffice ever really took over the mindspace of OpenOffice anyway.
It was really a terrible name if you're going after normie office workers. Nobody outside of open source people knows what "Libre" means or even how to pronounce it.
They already have their version, it's called Collabora Online/Office.
Freeoffice as the next name? Seems like they are exhausting them quickly.
I believe OpenOffice is so dead that the name is available again? That would be kind of hilarious, though probably untenable.
Can you really take over a project anybody can fork? Freedom is just a name change away.
I'm pretty sure most "normies" who are at all aware of what MS Office is, and what, if any, of its alternatives are, still use OpenOffice and think that it is the no-cost office suite. LibreOffice already has problems with brand recognition, last thing we need is another fork.
LibreOffice is a pretty bad name, it is too clearly a spin-off of OpenOffice and never really gained its own identity. Being identifiable as a bad project’s better fork is kind of a weak starting position.
That's pointing the underlying cultural issue. Taking the name for the thing it provided at some point, and consider it as unquestionable proxy to world view expected to be itself eternally static.
Not only our representation of the world is wrong, but world evolves possibly faster than cognitive abilities can keep track of without the minimum effort which is driving out of comfort zone.
That will just create another dead fork that no one works on.
LibreOffice exists because the devs of OpenOffice forked it. If the project leadership now ejects the devs, I think that the new fork will be the living one.
Fix the title. No one seems to recognize "TDF" (The Document Foundation) despite their daily dramatics, myself included.
"The Document Foundation" for anyone too lazy to look it up.
It has been a while since I've noticed a high-profile OSS schism; for anyone who isn't used to them, this is how communities behave. They're generally healthy as long as the stakes aren't too high. In a lighter moment, I might also call on TDF to expel any vim users too in the hope that they'll take the hint and switch to a more C-x aligned editor.
:tabnew<Enter>a Begone Emacs harlot! The user's of the one true universal editor will not be done away with so easily!<Esc>:wq!
I tried changing it, but I guess when a post hits the fp this is not possible anymore (only by mods).
It's not affected by hitting the FP but the edit window is 2 hours. I've edited it now. Sorry I didn't see this earlier!
Tour de France, obviously.
In France, TDF is a company that operates big TV and FM radio antennas, including on the Eiffel Tower and on many mountain-top.
Tours de France? ;)
(Pun explainer: silent s, so it sounds like the cycling event. Meaning Towers of France - tour means both tower and tour[en] in French, only their grammatical gender is different)
Clearly it stands for the Tiscrete Dourier Fransform
Transform Daddy Fourier
Talkin Dirty Floozies
[flagged]