this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2026
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LibreOffice Drama: The Document Foundation Removes Collabora Developers in One Sweep (itsfoss.com)
submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by antonim@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] RegularJoe@lemmy.world 51 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

The Document Foundation's official reply came from Italo Vignoli, a founder Collabora lists as having already exited TDF membership.

He has kept it short, confirming that the removals happened, pointing to TDF's recently adopted Community Bylaws as the basis. Those bylaws include a clause requiring anyone affiliated with a company in an active legal dispute with TDF to step down from membership.

Link to those bylaws from Jan 15

https://community.documentfoundation.org/t/vote-adopt-version-1-of-community-bylaws/13472

Quote from that link [bylaws] above

Members involved in legal claims for endangering the Foundation, eg. by means of putting the charitable status at risk, or misusing TDF’s funds, or by damaging any of TDF’s assets, or by attempting to do any of these must relinquish their membership by means of notification to the MC. If the legal claim, in relation to the mentioned matters, involves a company/organisation then also their affiliated members must relinquish their membership.

Back to the original linked article:

The stated rationale is that past situations saw people put their employer's interests ahead of the foundation's, and the clause exists to stop that happening again. The specifics of the legal dispute between TDF and Collabora are not mentioned by either party.

TDF also makes clear that a membership revocation is not a ban from contributing, with the project remaining open to anyone, and expects Collabora to keep contributing "when the time comes."

So without details, all the article really details is that this happened. The why is murky. It seems the TDF is trying to protect itself, but there's no description of Collabra or TDFs legal dispute.

[–] ViatorOmnium@piefed.social 23 points 2 days ago

The conflict of interests regarding the online version of Libreoffice was already bad enough even without a legal case looming over it.

While, pragmatically and unfortunately, big open source projects need to involve commercial partners to scale, depending on a single commercial partner is always a recipe for disaster.

[–] timestatic@feddit.org 4 points 1 day ago

Honestly this is a big nothingburger. Without further details there's nothing much we can really conclude other than TDF and Collabora being in a legal dispute. Nothing conclusive really