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.
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
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)
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.
Not just this, it the way the vote was announced seems very, very bad. Italo may have found legal issues, but one of the things he said was that legal action was being taken by Collabora. That… doesn’t seem to be the case.
Italo and co removed some very dedicated contributors from the TDF. What an absolute disaster.
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).
What lawsuit?!?
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.
Which free software license was it under?
formally AGPL but they add impossible conditions so it's not really AGPL
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.