alt.hn

4/1/2026 at 11:09:11 AM

The Document Foundation ejects its core developers

 https://www.collaboraonline.com/blog/tdf-ejects-its-core-developers/

by hackernewsblues

4/1/2026 at 4:16:11 PM

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.

by advisedwang

4/1/2026 at 6:47:56 PM

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)

by grandinj

4/1/2026 at 10:04:24 PM

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.

by salawat

4/2/2026 at 4:30:41 AM

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-...

by rurban

4/2/2026 at 6:13:14 AM

"...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).

by quikee

4/1/2026 at 4:39:52 PM

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.

by wmf

4/1/2026 at 5:08:10 PM

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.

by jancsika

4/1/2026 at 7:16:38 PM

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.

by karel-3d

4/1/2026 at 4:34:30 PM

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.

by MarkusQ

4/1/2026 at 6:01:34 PM

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.

by mejmeeks

4/1/2026 at 7:23:01 PM

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.

by mijoharas

4/2/2026 at 4:33:40 AM

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.

by rurban

4/1/2026 at 6:16:23 PM

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.

by Imustaskforhelp

4/1/2026 at 4:44:00 PM

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.

by jollymonATX

4/1/2026 at 7:26:16 PM

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...

by fenykep

4/2/2026 at 2:08:32 AM

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.

by jollymonATX

4/1/2026 at 11:01:25 PM

> 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.

by ranger_danger

4/1/2026 at 4:53:49 PM

> 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.

by jonas21

4/1/2026 at 6:46:47 PM

Agreed, I found this article hard to follow and emotive in a way that made it feel extremely biased.

by Seattle3503

4/1/2026 at 4:00:34 PM

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.

by commandlinefan

4/1/2026 at 4:02:27 PM

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.

by ranger_danger

4/1/2026 at 4:43:23 PM

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.

by chuckadams

4/1/2026 at 5:09:52 PM

I don't think so, I think it's more about TDF considering their involvement at that point a conflict of interest.

by ranger_danger

4/1/2026 at 6:13:12 PM

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.

by anigbrowl

4/1/2026 at 5:18:08 PM

This is ironic timing given the OnlyOffice/Euro-Office drama https://www.heise.de/en/news/Euro-Office-OnlyOffice-accuses-...

by amaccuish

4/1/2026 at 6:25:32 PM

Microsoft really has nothing to fear ...

by solarkraft

4/1/2026 at 9:18:35 PM

Why is that?

Office is still a core product, is it not?

by worik

4/1/2026 at 11:19:57 AM

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.

by not_your_vase

4/1/2026 at 7:01:23 PM

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.

by flyinghamster

4/1/2026 at 6:25:35 PM

> 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?

by zokier

4/1/2026 at 9:19:34 PM

1880s?

Not even then...

by worik

4/1/2026 at 7:43:47 PM

I mean, there was that whole drama between Edison and Tesla...

by chuckadams

4/1/2026 at 8:25:55 PM

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.

by Bratmon

4/1/2026 at 11:19:31 AM

https://community.documentfoundation.org/c/board-discuss/26

Looks like there is rebellion in the forums...

by hackernewsblues

4/1/2026 at 9:03:11 PM

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.

by Aurornis

4/1/2026 at 6:17:28 PM

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.

by mejmeeks

4/1/2026 at 7:39:12 PM

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.

by chris_wot

4/1/2026 at 12:12:02 PM

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.

by halJordan

4/1/2026 at 4:51:07 PM

He's a longtime OpenOffice/LibreOffice and now, I guess, CollabraOffice contributor.

by klooney

4/1/2026 at 7:41:03 PM

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...

by trelane

4/1/2026 at 5:09:12 PM

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.

by jamesbelchamber

4/1/2026 at 5:57:52 PM

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.

by oasisaimlessly

4/1/2026 at 5:55:27 PM

Euro office looking very suspicious here

by yuumei

4/1/2026 at 7:24:46 PM

Euro Office and OnlyOffice drama is not directly related to this office drama.

A different drama

by karel-3d

4/1/2026 at 6:38:12 PM

I don't have enough background to know if this is an April Fool's joke or not?

by fred_is_fred