Hacker News

Full circle indeed, nice historical capsule thanks

"The Document Foundation" for anyone too lazy to look it up.

It has been a while since I've noticed a high-profile OSS schism; for anyone who isn't used to them, this is how communities behave. They're generally healthy as long as the stakes aren't too high. In a lighter moment, I might also call on TDF to expel any vim users too in the hope that they'll take the hint and switch to a more C-x aligned editor.

Clearly it stands for the Tiscrete Dourier Fransform

I tried changing it, but I guess when a post hits the fp this is not possible anymore (only by mods).

In France, TDF is a company that operates big TV and FM radio antennas, including on the Eiffel Tower and on many mountain-top.

Tour de France, obviously.

I'm confident the person who most wants to sabotage LibreOffice's success is Italo Vignoli. He's involved in this issue as well, but the other core problem is his marketing strategy: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/author/italovignoli...

Most of his blogs are about how awful OOXML (Microsoft Office's open standard) formats are, and that everyone needs to switch to ODF (his preferred open standard).

What people don't want to use is products which don't work with everyone else's. LibreOffice works with Microsoft Office files really well, but for some reason Italo doesn't want you to know that. He wants the entire world to switch formats to LibreOffice's formats, but really that's just telling potential business users LibreOffice can't meet their needs... interacting with the existing monopoly of Microsoft Office users.

This is a self-sabotaging marketing approach. LibreOffice needs to be promoting itself as an excellent drop-in replacement for Microsoft Office which will easily interoperate with every other organization's office applications, regardless of format.

> People won't want to use products with so much drama and uncertainty.

Really? You think the average user cares about this drama?

Hah. Anyone with some tokens to burn can compose a report on the data?

> The project welcomes contributions from true believers in open source. As the majority of people at Collabora are such believers, we expect them to continue contributing when the time comes.

Kids, that's a perfect example of institutionalized passive-aggressive behavior.

I have a feeling that the Open Document Foundation is going to end up being the loser here. Collabora is the entity that can fund development with a commercial offering. It sounds like they employ the core contributors to the project as well.

Regardless of who "wins," I'm just here to say that I like OnlyOffice a lot better and switched away from LibreOffice. I like that it just looks more like a modern program and overall feels less clunky.

Saving you all a click. “The Document Foundation”, which seems to be the entity governing libreoffice?

Classic pattern. The board gets populated by people whose main skill is board politics, and they use governance tools to push out the people who actually build the thing. Seen this happen in multiple open source foundations.

From their blog: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/04/01/comment-...

> The Community Bylaws require that employees of companies involved in legal disputes with The Document Foundation be removed from TDF membership because, in the past, people made decisions in the interest of their employers rather than in the interest of The Document Foundation.

and

> The Document Foundation could have lost its charitable status, which would have had unforeseen consequences.

I'm not sure why they would have lost charitable status, but that seems like a legitimate concern.

They’re relaunching Libre Office online apparently, they don’t want competitors on their board I’m guessing

It's related in the sense that the EU push to free software office is what precipitated all this drama.

Followed by Arrow's impossibility theorem, and we have our cycle

When it comes to a governing board that's interested in all the intimate details of an office software suite, I strongly suspect you're not going to find anyone under 30.

Has to be #1, as the blog makes no mention of age restrictions. Ejecting people for being over 30 would be unheard of outside of Logan's Run! (vintage scifi movie)

I read that as they’re ejecting all but 30 people.

From the article: "These days some at TDF seem to emphasize equality instead."

I'm not sure exactly what is meant by that. My guess, having some experience with board-sitter parasites, is they're just appealing to empty principles to create the illusion of being important to the organization, because they're unable or unwilling to make more tangible and substantial contributions.

When somebody can't justify their role with the quality of their work, they look for other justifications instead. Ideological justifications work best because they aren't provable and anybody who questions the value of the supposed ideological contributions can simply be dismissed as being ideologically opposed (see: the sibling comment accusing you of ideological alignment with gamergate, even though libreoffice has nothing to do with gaming.)

For instance, suppose I am a useless parasite who decides to embed myself into the local school board; I have nothing of real value to contribute to such an organization, but maybe I want the role for the clout. Instead of doing something real, I could instead say that my role on the board is to advance the cause of equality. Anybody who says I'm useless can be construed as opposing equality. Anybody who tried to measure the actual equality in the org before and after my arrival can be dismissed because measuring equality is hard to do objectively.

(I learned most of this from a few relatives of mine, who are such board-seeking parasites. By the way, parasite board sitters can use opposition to "woke" in the way they use championing the cause of equality; both cynical empty words used to distract people from the lack of real, substantial and demonstrable contributions. Anybody who complains can be accused of being woke. It works exactly the same regardless of what flavor of disguise the parasite chooses.)

tl;dr Germans and coordination while mitigating takeover risk (ironically)

StarOffice was a German office suite bought by Sun Microsystems in 1999. Sun open-sourced it in 2000 as OpenOffice.org, which became the major free alternative to Microsoft Office through the 2000s. Sun kept significant control. They owned the trademark, required copyright assignment for contributions, and steered the project's direction. Many community contributors were uneasy with this arrangement but tolerated it because Sun was broadly seen as a good-faith actor.

Oracle acquired Sun in 2010. Oracle had a reputation for being far more aggressive about monetizing and controlling its acquisitions (the Java/Google lawsuit being another example). The OpenOffice.org community had already been frustrated by years of slow decision-making and corporate gatekeeping, and Oracle's arrival made the situation feel untenable.

A group of prominent community members and corporate contributors (including people from Red Hat, Novell/SUSE, Canonical, and Google) announced The Document Foundation in Sep 2010 and forked the codebase as LibreOffice. Oracle eventually donated the OpenOffice.org code to Apache but LibreOffice quickly became the version that mattered.

The reason they had to fork was that a single entity (first Sun, then Oracle) had unchecked power over the project. The Document Foundation was explicitly designed to prevent that. If there's no formal structure, whoever controls the servers, the domain name, the trademark, or the build infrastructure effectively controls the project. A foundation with bylaws, elected leadership, and distributed authority makes it much harder for any single company or individual to take the project hostage.

LibreOffice receives donations, employs some staff, holds trademarks, pays for infrastructure, and sponsors events. Under German law (TDF is registered in Berlin), you need a proper legal entity with accountable governance to do this. You can't just have "some developers" holding a bank account and a trademark informally. The foundation was officially incorporated on February 17, 2012.

Because to accomplish anything at scale you need organization. And organizing humans in anything other than forced labor involves respecting them, thus things like codes of conduct. These stories could be about anything and you gamergate veterans will show up grinding one of those axes. Care to throw in wild speculation about whether they use “master” as their main branch name, “slave” as backup database terminology or “allowlist”. You know, any of those things that are keeping America from being great and winning the war.

Based on that table it looks like “LibreOffice the name” ejected “LibreOffice the software development project” basically. Although, it isn’t really a corporate takeover, right? There was one company that was doing most of the work, now they’ve been ejected.

So why not just fork it under a new name.

Can you really take over a project anybody can fork? Freedom is just a name change away.