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Meet the team at The Document Foundation

2026-06-012026-06-07

LibreOffice is made by hundreds of people around the world, working on code, documentation, QA, translations, marketing, infrastructure and much more. Coordinating the project’s activities is the team at The Document Foundation, the non-profit behind LibreOffice. Let’s see what the team members do:

1. Christian Lohmaier, Release Engineer

Christian’s typical tasks include taking care of the continuous integration system (both the automation server and the build machines), managing the LibreOffice release process, handling app store updates with all the paperwork that entails, managing the technical side of language translations not only for LibreOffice, but for any translatable system we have and making sure our integration with payment platforms works smoothly. He has also been involved in creating and maintaining websites and web services.

Christian’s work is influencing the developer experience as well. In the past, LibreOffice’s Windows development setup was somewhat messy. After Christian introduced automation into the setup process with the help of WinGet scripts, there has been much less need for troubleshooting.

2. Dan Williams, Developer

Dan was involved in the Mac port back in the 2000s when LibreOffice was still called OpenOffice.org. For some months now he has been working for TDF on user interface and macOS tasks. He has done corrections to the handling of system UI themes, implemented support for special macOS keyboard shortcuts and macOS-specific menu items, fixed database links going missing from .ods files, and fixed an issue with printing notes from Impress presentations on macOS. His ongoing work includes experimenting with Qt UI on macOS and reworking the code for Notebookbar.

3. Florian Effenberger, Executive Director

Florian is one of the founders of TDF, and its Executive Director since 2014. He manages our worldwide team of 18 people, and deals with a variety of tasks in accounting, financials, taxes, budget, payroll, annual audit, banking, legal topics, employment and HR. He supports the board and the membership committee and onboards those new in office. He regularly gives presentations at events, is active in the German community and has written extensively about the tasks he is involved on our forum.

4. Guilhem Moulin, Infrastructure & Services

Guilhem is managing our servers and the approximately twenty web services needed every day by LibreOffice users and contributors. Major updates to the operating systems and the web applications require careful studying of what needs to be taken into account to ensure everything keeps operating smoothly. Often this goes into the level of studying individual code changes. Compatibility breakage has to be mitigated or at least communicated.

5. Heiko Tietze, UX Architect

Heiko is collaborating with user experience design volunteers in planning improvements to LibreOffice. Not being content with planning, he then goes and implements the proposals, either by himself or with help from others. Heiko always denies being a C++ developer yet inexplicably has over 700 LibreOffice code changes in his name. He has mentored in over a dozen Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and Outreachy projects, for example in the reworking of Table Styles and UI theming. Being an active mentor means that he is doing code reviews for new developers all year round as well as inventing new easy tasks.

A recent large-scale project of his is implementing vertical tabs in dialogs.

6. Hossein Nourikhah, Developer Community Architect

Over a hundred developers get their start in LibreOffice code every year. Facing seven million lines of code can be intimidating, so we have a tradition of providing a selection of tasks we call “easy hacks“. Hossein is tending to this catalogue of beginner tasks and reviewing the submitted code changes. Whenever a new developer has issues with setting up a development environment, he jumps in to help. He is also writing developer documentation on the TDF wiki and publishing blog posts about development.

He has mentored GSoC projects such as cross platform bindings for .NET and Python code auto-completion. His recent contributions include initial support for Qt 6 UI on Windows together with Michael Weghorn, based on earlier work by Jan-Marek Glogowski.

7. Ilmari Lauhakangas, Development Marketing

Ilmari is bringing in new contributors to quality assurance, design, C++ development and documentation. In a typical year he teaches nearly 200 people about getting involved in LibreOffice. He is also triaging (and sometimes fixing) bugs, doing web development, maintaining the wiki, doing code reviews and managing internship programs.

8. Italo Vignoli, Marketing & PR

Italo Vignoli is a founding member of The Document Foundation and the LibreOffice project, the Chairman Emeritus of Associazione LibreItalia, an Ambassador of Software Heritage, and a proud member of Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). He is a past board member of Open Source Initiative (OSI). Italo co-leads LibreOffice marketing, PR and media relations, co-chairs the LibreOffice Certification Program, and is a spokesman for the project. He also handles advocacy and marketing activities for the Open Document Format ISO standard.

9. Jonathan Clark, Developer

For the past two years Jonathan has been working on LibreOffice features in the categories of right-to-left scripts, complex text layout and Chinese-Japanese-Korean. In addition to numerous quality of life improvements, he has implemented support for Start/End paragraph alignment while making it the default instead of Left/Right, and made the CJK text grid compatible with Microsoft Word. On the mentoring side he is constantly reviewing code submissions from newcomers and was involved in the BASIC IDE object browser GSoC project.

Jonathan is currently looking into fundamental improvements in the LibreOffice user interface.

10. Juan José González, Web Technology Engineer

As mentioned earlier, TDF hosts a rather large number of web applications, some of them created from scratch. These custom web services include the Extensions and Templates site and the Crash Report site. Juan José has been heavily involved in redesigning and maintaining these two sites. He has also worked on sites for various LibreOffice conferences, improved our localisation tooling and created tools to combat spam in our forums.

11. Michael Weghorn, Developer

TDF wants LibreOffice to be easy to use for visually impaired people, and three years ago Michael was hired to make sure we always deliver accessible software. LibreOffice has lots of variety in its content types and user interface widgets. This means that we are sometimes testing the limits of accessibility APIs, which are also different per operating system. To ensure optimal results in LibreOffice accessibility, Michael is working with developers of toolkits such as GTK and Qt, and with developers of screen-reader applications such as Orca and NVDA.

At the moment Michael is working to bring LibreOffice’s Qt user interface support to the next level and seeing how it works on Windows.

12. Mike Saunders, Marketing and Community Coordinator

Mike is a long-time Linux and free software journalist, and joined the team in 2016 to work in the areas of marketing and community outreach. He helps to maintain the LibreOffice social media channels, interacting with users to encourage them to join the project and contribute. He also interviews community members, writes blog posts, works on videos and podcasts, and organises events.

13. Neil Roberts, Developer

Neil joined the team a couple of months ago to improve the scripting and API side of LibreOffice. He has implemented a new approach for Lua UNO API bindings, added QuickJS-based JavaScript bindings together with Stephan Bergmann and made it possible to create and edit Python macros via the Macro Organizer dialog.

Neil will also be collaborating with Michael Weghorn on user interface renovation projects.

14. Olivier Hallot, Documentation Coordinator

Olivier started contributing back in the OpenOffice.org days in 2001 as part of the Brazilian community and is one of the founding members of TDF. For ten years he has been leading the documentation effort for LibreOffice. The documentation team maintains several guide books, a huge collection of help articles, wiki pages and even tooltip texts seen within LibreOffice itself. Olivier has opinions on writing good release notes and is not shy to share them!

Olivier is also fixing UI issues and making sure everything works with regards to localisation.

15. Sophie Gautier, Foundation Coordinator

Sophie has been in the LibreOffice project since the beginning (and in OpenOffice.org before that), and helps with TDF administration tasks, such as organising meetings and managing the travel refund tool. In addition, she helps to organise the yearly LibreOffice Conference, and works with the localisation communities to make LibreOffice available in as many languages as possible.

16. Stephan, Administrative Assistant

Stephan helps with administrative tasks for the foundation, such as meeting minutes, accounting reports, donation queries, travel bookings, travel expense reimbursements, ordering equipment, issuing donation receipts, payment processing, and translations.

17. Vissarion Fysikopoulos, Developer

Having started about a month ago, Vissarion will focus on taking Base to the next level. The current development plan includes finishing the new Report Builder, polishing Firebird support and adding support for SQLite.

18. Xisco Faulí, QA Engineer

Xisco did a Google Summer of Code project for LibreOffice in 2011 and joined the TDF team in 2016 to work on QA (quality assurance). At first he was triaging bugs, but gradually moved to writing automated tests. By now he has added thousands of tests. He keeps LibreOffice’s hundred external dependencies up to date, fixes critical bugs, improves graphics support, helps with the release process, is involved in reviewing security reports and handles the crash report system alongside other automated systems related to guarding the quality of the software. He also mentors GSoC projects.

As mentioned, the team is just a small part of the overall LibreOffice community. Everyone is welcome to find out what you can do for LibreOffice – to learn new skills, meet new people, and be part of a project making software used by millions of people around the world!

LibreOffice Native Language Projects – TDF Annual Report 2025

2026-05-26

LibreOffice is available in over 120 languages, thanks to the work of localisation communities around the world. We asked them to summarise their work in 2025 – here’s what they had to say…

Czech

The Czech community maintained an active presence both online and in-person. Their localisation efforts remained strong, keeping the UI fully translated and the Help files at 95% completion. The team also stayed connected with their user base through the Czech Ask LibreOffice site along, with social media presence across X, Facebook, Instagram and Mastodon.

There was also outreach at events. The team hosted dedicated LibreOffice booths at InstallFest in April and LinuxDays in October, both held in Prague. Documentation also saw significant updates, with the publication of the Getting Started Guide (24.8), the Calc Guide (25.2), and the Draw Guide (25.8).

Danish

The Danish community focused on multimedia education and consistent localisation in 2025. There was the launch of the @libreofficeskolen (“LibreOffice School”) YouTube channel. This initiative provides the Danish-speaking public with a series of instructional videos designed to lower the barrier to entry for new users. Alongside this output, the community kept the UI and Help files fully translated at 100%, and ensured that LibreOffice promotional videos were accessible via localised subtitles.

Dutch

Beyond maintaining the local website and providing assistance via the Ask LibreOffice website and mailing lists, the Dutch-speaking community worked on many documentation updates.

Beginning in January with the Calc Guide for 24.8, the community then published a steady stream of translated manuals for version 25.2, including the Writer, Impress, Math, and Getting Started Guides. This effort then lead to the release of the updated 25.2 Calc Guide in July. On the localisation front, the Dutch team continued their work on Weblate, successfully maintaining 100% translation coverage for both the User Interface (UI) and the Help system, following upstream changes.

Finnish

The Finnish community focused on steady and ongoing translation efforts. The team prioritised localisation of the UI, with secondary work continuing on the Help system. To ensure the long-term sustainability of these efforts, the community has been proactive in outreach, utilising the vapaaehtoistyo.fi online platform to recruit new volunteers.

French

On the technical front, the French-speaking team maintained 100% translation coverage for both the UI and Help systems across all versions of LibreOffice. Their localisation work extended to the new Hugo-based website, release notes, and the Extensions wiki page. Significant progress was also made on the translation of Calc functions on the wiki and the subtitling of promotional videos.

Outreach was a major topic in 2025, with the community representing LibreOffice at events like Capitole du Libre in Toulouse, and Open Source Experience in Paris. The team also worked on academic ties, coordinating with UBO University to involve translation students in user guide writing. Beyond documentation and QA, the French team supported users through the Ask LibreOffice site and published various articles on LinuxFR. In addition, there were REGEX tutorials for civil servants and introductory presentations at public media libraries.

German

Throughout the year, the German-speaking community wrote blog posts (and translated others from the English-language blog), maintained its social media activity on Mastodon, and worked on user interface translations. Community members also attended local events on behalf of the LibreOffice project, such as the Augsburger Linux-Infotag 2025 and Digitaltag 2025 in Duisburg.

Irish

The Irish-speaking community made significant steps in 2025 to bring the suite to native speakers. Currently, the UI and website translations are nearing 100%, with the LibreOffice 26.2 user interface already reaching a 96% completion rate. The team’s primary focus is now on finalising these remaining strings and resolving technical checks.

Italian

The Italian-speaking community maintained 100% translation status for the UI and Help files across all active versions of the suite. The team helped with localising the project’s new Hugo-based website and kept the Italian-speaking public informed by translating all release notes and press releases. Current efforts are focused on the ongoing translation of Calc functions on the wiki and a comprehensive revision of various wiki pages.

In 2025, the Associazione LibreItalia organised a full-day LibreItalia conference in Gradisca d’Isonzo, following the adoption of a regional law mandating the use of free open source software in Friuli Venezia Giulia, an eastern Italian region bordering Slovenia. The politician who signed the law provided an overview of the approval process.

The event was organised by Marco Marega, a long-standing member of LibreItalia who is active in the localisation team and other areas of the project. Several members of the Pordenone LUG attended the conference and initiated a discussion about organising the 2026 LibreOffice Conference in their city. This discussion then evolved into an official proposal.

Japanese

The Japanese community had a busy year in terms of events. There was the LibreOffice Asia Conference 2025 in Tokyo, a two-day event that brought together 70 attendees. Outreach extended internationally as Japanese members traveled to COSCUP 2025 in Taiwan to deliver three talks and strengthen ties with the Taiwanese community.

The community also organised:

Online Hackfests: Held 46 times via Jitsi and YouTube Live
Online Study Parties: Three sessions dedicated to user knowledge sharing
LibreOffice Days: Monthly offline meetups in Osaka, co-hosted with the Open Data Mokumoku-kai
Open Source Conferences (OSC): Booths and hackfests at seven locations across Japan, from Hokkaido to Fukuoka

On the documentation front, the team published the Writer Guide for LibreOffice 25.2 in Japanese. Localisation efforts currently stand at 91% for the UI and 46% for Help. The team also remained responsive to end users, answering nearly 50 new questions on Ask LibreOffice, publishing 20 blog articles, and maintaining a steady presence on X, Facebook and Bluesky.

Kazakh

Starting in late 2025, the community launched a refresh of its translation efforts, achieving 100% UI completeness in time for the LibreOffice 26.2 release. This work extended to the localisation of the official website and the activation of the Help master branch, preparing for future documentation projects.

To improve consistency across other open source projects, the team is currently developing a unified Kazakh glossary derived from various localisation projects. Furthermore, the community has begun testing the use of AI-assisted translations, reporting high-quality results to improve their workflows in 2026.

Tagalog

The Tagalog community made steps forward in localisation, maintaining the user interface and Help files at a high completion rate of 98–99% across all versions. The team continued to integrate Deep Language Modeling to automate accuracy verification. While the community experiences a natural ebb and flow of contributors, there is growing interest in expanding support to regional dialects, such as Ilocano.

The team also wishes to extend a special note of gratitude to the dedicated group of US-based translation helpers whose contributions were vital to success in 2025.

TDF says: many thanks to all native-language projects for their work in 2025! Of course, this is just a selection of their activities, based on communities that reported their activities, but there are many more too.

Like what we do? Support the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation – get involved and help our volunteers, or make a donation. Thank you!

Twenty Years On, ODF Is Still the Only Open Standard for Office Documents, and the Only One Governments Can Trust

2026-05-082026-05-08

Berlin, 8 May 2026 – Twenty years ago this week, on 3 May 2006, the Open Document Format cleared its Draft International Standard ballot at ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34 with unanimous approval. On 30 November 2006 it was published as ISO/IEC 26300. Two decades later, ODF remains what it was on the day of its ratification: the only open, vendor-neutral, freely implementable international standard for office documents in existence.

Everything else on the market is a vendor format with a standards number attached.

That distinction was contested in 2006. It is not contestable in 2026. The competing format pushed through ISO in 2008 – under a fast-track process whose abuses are now part of the documentary record of standards governance – has since splintered into a Strict variant almost no implementation actually uses and a Transitional variant that preserves, by design, the undocumented behaviours of a single vendor’s legacy products. A standard that exists to encode one company’s bugs is not a standard. It is a moat with a certificate.

ODF has no Transitional mode. It has no undocumented behaviours. It has no vendor whose commercial roadmap can quietly rewrite what conformance means. The specification is publicly available at no cost from ISO and from OASIS. The schemas are auditable. The implementations are multiple, independent, and free. This is not advocacy language. It is the working definition of a standard, and ODF is the only office-document format that meets it.

The political weather has finally caught up with the technical reality. Germany’s federal administration has mandated ODF through the Deutschland-Stack. The European Commission’s own services are under sustained pressure – including from this Foundation – to align procurement with the open-standards commitments the Commission itself has signed. Brazil has legislated open formats into its educational system through Lei 15.211/2025. The pattern is the same on every continent where public bodies have stopped to ask the only question that matters: in what format does a society keep its own records, and who decides when that format changes?

For twenty years, the answer to the second question – for any administration that chose ODF – has been: we do. For any administration that chose the alternative, the answer has been: the vendor does, and the administration will be informed.

“ODF is the document format of a public that has decided not to outsource its memory,” said Florian Effenberger, Executive Director of The Document Foundation. “The governments now mandating ODF are not making a technical choice. They are reclaiming a sovereignty they should never have surrendered.”

The implementation landscape reflects the same divide. LibreOffice, developed by The Document Foundation and a global community of contributors, uses ODF as its native format and is the reference implementation of the standard. Collabora Online extends ODF support to enterprise and cloud deployments. Together they constitute the working core of the ODF ecosystem. Other office suites – including those that market themselves with the vocabulary of openness while defaulting to a competitor’s vendor format – are not part of that ecosystem and should not be confused with it.

The Document Foundation will mark the twentieth anniversary across 2026 with a programme of publications, policy briefs, and community events. The LibreOffice Conference will dedicate a full track to ODF, coordinated with the OASIS Technical Committee, which is currently advancing version 1.4 of the specification. Material on the history, the structural design, and the policy implications of ODF will be published throughout the year on the TDF blog.

A standard is worth what it still does after the people who wrote it have moved on. ODF is read, written, and trusted by software none of its original authors imagined, on hardware none of them could have specified, in jurisdictions none of them lobbied. It has aged the way public infrastructure is supposed to age: quietly, reliably, and in everyone’s hands.

That is the anniversary worth marking. Not the certificate from 2006, but the twenty years of evidence since: evidence that the open-standards bet was the right one, that the alternative was the trap its critics warned it would be, and that the governments now choosing ODF are not innovating. They are catching up.

Welcome Vissarion Fisikopoulos, new LibreOffice developer focusing on Base

2026-04-19

LibreOffice Base is the database component of the suite, and hasn’t seen a lot of development activity in recent years. So The Document Foundation – the non-profit behind the software – wants to change that! Following Neil Roberts, we now have a second new developer, Vissarion Fisikopoulos, so let’s hear from him…

Tell us a bit about yourself!

Hi everyone, I’m Vissarion, a software engineer and researcher based in Athens, Greece, and I’m very happy to have joined The Document Foundation to work on LibreOffice Base. My background combines scientific computing, databases, and open-source development, and I’ve been a long term contributor to several open source projects like MySQL, Boost C++ libraries and GeomScale. I am active in open source communities, and I speak regularly about open source development at conferences such as FOSDEM.

What’s your new role at TDF, and what will you be working on?

My new role at TDF is to work on LibreOffice Base and databases more broadly, with a focus on Base itself and the ways database functionality connects with the rest of LibreOffice.
In practice, that means working mostly in C++, fixing bugs, improving code quality, and helping implement features across Base’s frontend and backend.

How can all users of LibreOffice help you in this work?

Users can help a lot in this work!

Clear bug reports, reproducible test cases, feedback on real-world Base workflows, and testing development versions are all extremely valuable, because they help turn vague problems into issues that can actually be fixed.

And beyond that, contributions through QA, documentation, translations, and newcomer-friendly developer tasks all help strengthen the project as a whole.

So if you use LibreOffice Base, or if you care about databases and open source office software in general, your feedback and participation can genuinely help to shape the work ahead.

Thanks Vissarion – we’re looking forward to your work!

The Foundation Is Strong: What TDF Is, Why It Matters, and Where It Is Going

2026-04-172026-04-19

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.

Open Letter to some Collabora Developers

2026-04-112026-04-11

Yes, we should have published this blog post some time ago. We would like to thank Mike Kaganski, who was affected by the recent suspension of membership, for reminding us so politely of our oversight: mikekaganski.wordpress.com/2026/04/05/the-post-they-managed-to-avoid/.

Had we published the post earlier, we would probably have avoided some of the anger expressed in certain messages. However, this would not have changed the situation, which might feel like an unfairness to some, even though it isn’t.

You are absolutely right to point out that your personal conduct was not the issue. You have all contributed generously and honestly to this project, and some of you still do, for which we are very grateful. What happened does not reflect on your integrity as people or as developers.

The problem is that once elected, several of your company’s representatives acted in ways that put in serious danger the status of TDF as a non-profit organisation.

The foundation could not treat this as individual issues to be assessed on a case-by-case basis. We had to address the vulnerability of having trustees whose primary institutional loyalty lies with an organisation other than TDF.

This is not guilt by association in a moral sense, but recognition that the foundation’s governance structures have consequences regardless of individual intentions.

Even if a board member votes in good faith in their employer’s interests, this creates a conflict of interest that the foundation cannot manage retrospectively on a case-by-case basis once the damage has been done.

We had to improve the governance structures and rules of each of the bodies that form TDF in order to prevent any further damage that could be caused by overlapping loyalties. This affected everyone, including you.

Regardless of the structural changes needed to protect the foundation, the code and the community, these will remain shared assets to which everyone is welcome to contribute.

The post that we should have written, and which we are writing today, is as follows:

We are grateful to you. We are sorry that this is the outcome. We are not saying that you are bad people, bad contributors or bad members of our community.

The Document Foundation and the LibreOffice project are open by definition and principle to all developers. Our doors have never been closed to any of you, and they never will be.

The technical excellence and enthusiasm for teamwork that you have demonstrated time and again are the cornerstones of our joint achievements.

However, we must tell you that the structure was flawed and the harm was real. We could not correct the structure without this consequence also temporarily affecting people who did not deserve it.

Sadly, what has happened is an example of the kind of unfairness that often follows structural changes, and you are fully entitled to feel like victims of this unfairness.