The Document Foundation Removes Dozens of Collabora-Affiliated Members
A bylaws provision aimed at conflicts of interest cost LibreOffice several of its longest-serving core contributors their foundation membership.
The Document Foundation, the nonprofit that stewards LibreOffice, removed approximately 30 people affiliated with Collabora from its membership in early April 2026, citing its own Community Bylaws rather than announcing the move as a standalone decision. The Document Foundation addressed the removals directly in a post on its community blog on April 1, 2026.
The bylaws provision at issue requires that employees or contractors of a company involved in a legal dispute with The Document Foundation be removed from foundation membership. According to The Document Foundation, the underlying rationale traces back to past instances where people in dual roles made decisions serving their employer's interests rather than the foundation's. Neither The Document Foundation nor Collabora has publicly detailed the specifics of the legal dispute that triggered the provision.
The scale of the removal is notable given Collabora's role in LibreOffice's development: the affected group includes seven of the project's all-time top ten most active core code committers who were still contributing. Collabora is a commercial company that has long provided major engineering contributions to LibreOffice, in addition to selling its own commercial products and support built on the same codebase.
Collabora responded publicly, framing the ejections as based on "unproven legal concerns and guilt by association" rather than any established wrongdoing, and announced it would shift focus toward a separate, more differentiated Collabora Office product with reduced day-to-day involvement in LibreOffice's upstream development going forward.
The dispute highlights a structural tension that foundation-governed open source projects are specifically designed to guard against: when a single commercial entity accumulates outsized influence over a community-governed codebase, through both financial contribution and board or membership representation, resolving a conflict between that company and the foundation can mean removing people who are, by a wide margin, some of the most technically active contributors the project has. The Document Foundation has framed the bylaws enforcement as protecting its governance model against exactly that kind of concentrated influence; Collabora has framed it as an overcorrection that punishes individual contributors for their employer's dispute.
Source: TDF Community Blog — Comment about Collabora blog post