LibreOffice Has Never Been in Higher Demand. Its Foundation Is Tearing Itself Apart.

LibreOffice 26.8 shipped on 26 August with "no artificial intelligence" in the headline, and The Document Foundation says it passed a million downloads in its first week. A German state says nearly 80% of its administration's workplaces now run LibreOffice instead of Microsoft Office. By any measure, demand for a Microsoft-free office suite is higher than it has been in years.

In the same months, the foundation that makes LibreOffice suspended around thirty of the people who write its code.

The release notes don't mention that. It matters more than any feature in them.

What actually happened

On 1 April, Collabora, the company that employs many of LibreOffice's longest-serving developers, announced that The Document Foundation's (TDF) Membership Committee had removed all Collabora staff and partners from the foundation's membership. Collabora says that included seven of the ten most prolific core committers of all time. TDF calls it a suspension, not an expulsion, and says new Community Bylaws require it: members whose employers are in a serious legal dispute with the foundation can't be members.

TDF's reasoning, set out in its own account, is that earlier boards awarded development tenders to companies whose representatives sat on the board, and gave those companies free use of the LibreOffice trademark to sell the suite in app stores. TDF's lawyers said both broke non-profit law. TDF says German authorities requested audits, that two (2023 and 2024) confirmed the problem, and that a third came out positive once it froze tenders and acted on membership.

Collabora disputes nearly all of it. The CEO of its LibreOffice division, Michael Meeks, says there is no confirmed misuse of funds in the most recent audit and accuses TDF of manufacturing a pretext. TDF says there is no lawsuit, only "legal consultations". Neither side has published the audits, and TDF says it can't. LWN's reporting is the fairest account available: there are real issues to address, but it's unclear TDF needed to disenfranchise everyone affiliated with Collabora.

TDF has a point

Give the foundation its due. A non-profit that loses its charitable status can be destroyed by it, and directors who sit on both sides of a contract are exactly what auditors flag. A figure of about €20,600 in misused funds from the 2023 audit has circulated, according to LWN, via a forum email. That's small money, but the principle isn't small. Thorsten Behrens, who was on the board at the time, told LWN the trademark arrangement was stopped in 2022 once lawyers raised non-profit-law concerns, while insisting nobody broke the law.

There's also a real tension in having a commercial company as your biggest contributor. Collabora took its own Online product off TDF's infrastructure in 2020, and TDF's decision this spring to revive LibreOffice Online, over Meeks's vote against, is a direct challenge to Collabora's business.

But the cure is the problem

It punishes people nobody blames. TDF's own open letter to the affected developers says their personal conduct wasn't the issue, and concedes the consequences landed on people who didn't deserve them. A fix whose authors admit it hits the innocent isn't collateral damage. It's a choice.

Narrower tools existed, and TDF already built them. Recusal rules, a conflict-of-interest policy and a new procurement policy are all in place, by TDF's own account. If those work, mass suspension isn't needed. If they don't, TDF should say why.

Nobody can check the case. The audits are private. The board's term expired in February and, per LWN's April reporting, the election was still pending. A foundation that suspends contributors on the strength of documents the community can't read is asking for trust at the exact moment it hasn't earned it. One of the affected developers, Mike Kaganski, says he was told he's barred from membership until at least the end of 2029. That's his account, but it matches the three-year bar in the bylaws LWN quotes.

The numbers don't favour the foundation. By TDF's own figures, Collabora's 47 developers wrote 43% of LibreOffice's patches over the last year. TDF's 8 staff developers wrote 37%, and 221 volunteers wrote 17%. TDF says it's hiring. Its public ledgers show about €1.98 million in donations in 2025, with roughly €590,000 spent on contractors and €500,000 on salaries. That's a thin base for replacing the largest contributor.

"But the code is shared"

That's the strongest counterargument, and it's mostly true. LibreOffice is MPL-licensed, and Collabora says it has no plans to change its licence. 26.8 still ships features written by Collabora engineers, including pivot-table calculated fields and presentation sections, per It's FOSS. The licence is the safety net, and it's working.

But shared code isn't the same as code maintained by shared people. Collabora now develops its desktop office on its own infrastructure and says it will contribute to LibreOffice only "where that makes sense". Its Classic line, built on LibreOffice 26.2, dropped the Base database on 2 October and is Windows-only. macOS and Linux customers stay on the older 25.04 version. That's what a fork looks like from the inside: quiet drift, not drama.

The sovereignty wave sits on both halves

Here's the part nobody seems to be connecting. openDesk, the suite behind the International Criminal Court's move away from Microsoft and, per the Irish Times, the German chancellery's, uses Collabora for its web office. Schleswig-Holstein, the poster child of the migration, runs desktop LibreOffice, the TDF side. Governments buying "digital sovereignty" are betting on both halves of a project whose halves have stopped talking.

TDF's advice to organisations doesn't help. Its business page says it provides no technical support and tells serious deployments to buy an enterprise edition from an ecosystem partner. The biggest partner is the one it just suspended, and its new desktop product is not yet enterprise-supported, by its own admission.

What to do about it

If you're an individual, install LibreOffice. Nothing here touches your documents. ODF is an ISO standard, and TDF says 26.8 has no AI, no telemetry and no account requirement.

If you run it for an organisation, ask your vendor which branch they're building on, who is contractually responsible for security patches, and what happens if Collabora's desktop product and LibreOffice drift apart. Keep your documents in ODF so the exit stays open.

If you donate, do it with your eyes open. TDF says it raises about a fifth of what Thunderbird does, and that gap is real. Its ledgers are public. Read them.

Free software's promise was never that the organisations behind it would be wise. It was that when they aren't, you can walk away with the code. LibreOffice still passes that test, because of a licence written long before anyone fell out. The foundation is spending that safety net faster than it can replace it.