LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation

Source: Hacker News

Ideally, we would have preferred to avoid this post. However, the articles and comments published in response to Collabora’s and Michael Meeks’ biased posts compel us to provide this background information on the events that led to the current situation.

Background

The launch of the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation was handled with great enthusiasm by the founding group. They were driven by a noble goal, but also by a bit of healthy recklessness. It was impossible to imagine what would happen after September 28 2020, the date of the announcement.

At the time, nobody could foresee that the companies that had supported OpenOffice.org until then would create a project to kill LibreOffice. If the project were to be successful, it would require resources greater than those available, and above all, deep management experience.

Fortunately, the project grew quite rapidly. However, the founders’ different backgrounds and opinions were at the same time the reason for some bold decisions—many of which were right—as well as a few mistakes, which are the root cause of some of the current problems:

• Granting free use of the LibreOffice brand only to companies in the ecosystem, to allow them to sell the software in Microsoft and Apple’s online stores.
• Awarding contracts for the development of LibreOffice—new features, fixing “legacy” bugs, etc.—to companies whose representatives were on the foundation’s Board of Directors and who were active throughout the procurement process.

Both decisions were later found to be incorrect for reasons relating to the non‑profit law to which The Document Foundation must adhere. They violated the law itself. When this fact was brought to the attention of the Board of Directors by the foundation’s legal counsel, the companies that had benefited from these errors sought to maintain the status quo rather than finding a solution. From the end of 2021 to the middle of 2022, this could have been resolved swiftly and with minimal difficulty.

Governance Issues and Decisions

The attitude increased tensions within the Board of Directors (BoD), adding to pre‑existing frictions that began in 2020 when the majority of the new board decided to terminate the plan to transfer many of TDF’s tasks and assets to a parallel organisation called TDC. Several issues that the current board had to solve stemmed from elements of that project that had been partially executed.

The origins of TDC are controversial. One reason given for setting up the parallel organisation was the “alleged inefficiency” of the TDF team, expressed by some directors. Instead of addressing the supposed problem with reorganisation or training, the BoD reacted by creating a new problem: a parallel structure with a supposedly “highly efficient” team that would highlight the alleged inefficiency of the TDF team.

TDC was presented at the LibreOffice Conference in Almería in 2019 without prior notice, raising concerns within the team and the community. The parallel organisation’s project envisaged leveraging TDF’s financial resources as startup funds. This attempt resulted in permanent damage to relations between the project’s components, especially between certain BoD members and the team.

Audit and Recent Measures

After years of discussions marked by accusations and finger‑pointing, during which no real progress was made in resolving the legal issues, the authorities requested an audit. The results confirmed that resolving the issues was absolutely necessary to avoid losing non‑profit status, with unforeseen consequences.

The presence of company representatives on the BoD—elected by employees of those same companies that are also TDF members—caused further delays in finding a solution, which has not yet been reached.

Fortunately, the introduction of restrictive measures—such as the decision to forfeit TDF membership status of Collabora employees and the freezing of tenders—alongside a robust procurement policy for development, resulted in a positive outcome for the third audit. At least, the BoD has demonstrated a willingness to break the deadlock that has persisted since 2022.

The board also reviewed governance issues from the past and set clear rules to minimise the risk of recurrence. These rules are set out in the Code of Ethics and Fiduciary Duties, the updated Conflict of Interest Policy, and the Community Bylaws.

Future Outlook

If we could rewind the course of history, some of the choices made since 2010 would hopefully be different, and no one would repeat the mistakes or the wrong behaviours of the past.

As we said at the beginning, we would gladly have done without this post, but it was necessary to set the record straight and avoid speculation.

TDF has been preparing for some time for Collabora’s announcement by hiring developers and exploring new partnership opportunities to support a growing interest in LibreOffice on the desktop—a viable option for many deployments, the cloud, and mobile—and in ODF as the preferred document format for governments worldwide.

Thanks to the growing importance of free and open‑source software, as well as open standards for document formats, the concepts we have been advocating for over twenty years have finally reached political institutions and users. The Document Foundation and the LibreOffice project are well positioned for the future.