Category: Community

The Document Foundation was created in 2010 with a single, non-negotiable premise: that a free, fully-featured office suite, built on open standards and governed in the public interest, is infrastructure for democracy. Not a product. Not a market position. Infrastructure, the kind that belongs to everyone and can be taken from no one.

Sixteen years later, that premise is under pressure. And it is worth stating clearly, on the record, what TDF is, what it has done, what it is doing, and why the decisions it has made – including the difficult ones – follow directly from the founding commitment rather than betraying it.

What a Foundation Is For

Our foundation, like many others, exists to hold something in trust. Not for its current contributors, not for its most prolific developers and not for the companies that build products on top of its work, but for the public, across time. That is not a bureaucratic abstraction. It is a legal and ethical obligation that governs every decision the Board of Directors makes.

In Germany, where TDF is registered, such obligations are enforced by law. A gemeinnützige Stiftung – a foundation with charitable status – operates under strict rules designed to prevent any private interest from capturing a public asset. When those rules are tested, the foundation has no discretion: it must act to protect its status, its assets, and its mission, or it ceases to exist in any meaningful sense.

This is the context in which recent governance decisions must be understood. Not as a power struggle and not as the revenge of administrators against engineers, but as the fulfillment of a legal and institutional duty that TDF’s founders accepted when they chose this structure in 2010.

What Actually Happened

Over several years, independent lawyers identified two main areas in which decisions made by board members associated to ecosystem companies created conflicts of interest serious enough to endanger TDF’s charitable status.

These were not hypothetical risks or bureaucratic hair-splitting. They were documented, in writing, by multiple qualified professionals with no stake in the outcome.

Attempts to address these problems through internal policy reform began as early as 2021. A conflict-of-interest policy was introduced. However, the version that was ultimately approved was weaker than what TDF’s legal advisors had recommended. The stronger version was not approved by a board that included representatives of the companies whose conduct was in question. Unfortunately, the milder version proved insufficient.

By 2023 and 2024, the problems were confirmed in successive audit cycles. The Board’s current composition – which no longer includes employees of ecosystem companies – then proceeded to adopt governance reforms, as a change of behavior was urged for repeatedly by lawyers. Amongst the changes introduced, a bylaw provision that suspends membership for individuals whose employers are involved in legal proceedings that directly threaten the foundation’s existence.

The scope of this provision is narrow and specific: it does not apply to ordinary commercial disputes, but only to situations in which the foundation’s charitable status, assets or legal standing are at risk.

The suspension of membership for more than thirty individuals employed by one ecosystem partner followed the activation of this provision, but was announced in detail by two different messages which were clearly outlining the consequences for TDF Members.

The individuals remain welcome in the LibreOffice community. They retain their roles in the Engineering Steering Committee and other technical bodies. They are invited to TDF events. The suspension applies to formal TDF membership and the governance rights that come with it, for the entire duration of the legal consultation process.

This is not a purge. It is a governance safeguard doing exactly what governance safeguards are designed to do.

What TDF Is Building

It would be a mistake to read the current moment as purely defensive. While managing a governance crisis that it did not choose, TDF has continued to invest in the software and the community that give the foundation its purpose.

In the past twelve months, TDF’s eight staff developers contributed 4,077 patches to LibreOffice. Two additional developers have recently joined TDF staff, with one specifically assigned to LibreOffice Base, a module that has been under-resourced for years. Also, work is underway on deeper code modernization: architectural improvements that have accumulated for decades and that require sustained, focused effort rather than feature-driven patch contributions. Announcements on this work are forthcoming.

TDF is also actively developing its thinking on LibreOffice Online. The community has expressed clear interest in a genuinely community-governed online editing capability, distinct from the commercially driven fork that currently occupies that space. This is early-stage work, responsive to community demand, and it will proceed on the community’s terms.

On the standards and policy front, TDF continues its advocacy for ODF as the native document format for public administration software procurement. The Deutschland-Stack mandate, Brazil’s Lei 15.211/2025, and the ongoing digital sovereignty conversation in EU institutions all represent vindication of positions TDF has held and argued for years. This work – unglamorous, slow, and essential – is what a foundation does that a company cannot.

The Question of Meritocracy

The argument has been made, loudly and repeatedly in recent weeks, that TDF has betrayed the meritocratic principles on which LibreOffice was founded, that by limiting the governance role of the most prolific code contributors, the foundation has handed control to people who do not deserve it.

This argument deserves a serious answer rather than dismissal. Meritocracy, as a governance principle, requires that merit be defined in terms of the goals of the organization.

In a commercial software company, lines of code and commit counts might be reasonable proxies for value. In a public-interest foundation whose mission is to protect free software as a commons, merit includes legal compliance, community stewardship, standards advocacy, documentation, translation, user support, and long-term protection of the assets against capture by any single interest, including the most technically capable one.

The original sin of the meritocracy argument as applied here is the assumption that writing code confers the right to govern a foundation. It does not – any more than being the largest donor confers the right to direct a charity’s strategy, or being the most productive employee confers the right to override a board’s fiduciary decisions. These are different roles, each one with a different accountability, and conflating them is not a defense of meritocracy, but an argument for capture.

TDF values its developer community without reservation. It is investing in growing that community, both inside the foundation and across the broader ecosystem. But a foundation even partially governed by the people associated with its largest commercial contributor is not a foundation but a subsidiary.

The Road Ahead

LibreOffice is healthy. Its codebase is actively maintained, its release cadence is regular, its user base is growing in the sectors – public administration, education, and civic infrastructure – where free software matters most. The governance difficulties of recent months have been painful and public, but they have not compromised the software.

TDF is not complacent about the challenges ahead. The competitive landscape is more demanding than ever. Microsoft’s AI integration, although problematic under many points of view, raises the stakes for interoperability. The digital sovereignty moment in Europe creates both opportunities and obligations. The foundation’s technical roadmap must match the ambition of its policy positions.

What TDF will not do is resolve these challenges by abandoning the principles that make it worth defending. The foundation holds, not out of stubbornness, but because the alternative is to become something that no longer serves the purpose for which it was built.

Sixteen years ago, a group of sixteen people decided that the world needed office software that belonged to everyone. That decision has not aged at all. It has, if anything, become more important, and TDF exists to honor it.