LibreOffice’s Board Ejected 30+ Core Devs Who Wrote 70% of the Code
LibreOffice’s Board Ejected 30+ Core Devs Who Wrote 70% of the CodeThe Document Foundation kicked out the people who actually build LibreOffice. The devs are still writing code. The board is still writing press releases. Everything is fine.
Top committer: 37,556 commits over 25 years. Collabora devs hold 7 of the top 10 spots. All ejected from TDF membership.
Honestly, I’ve watched this movie before. It’s the one where the people who do zero coding decide the people who do all the coding are the problem. Michael Meeks — a 15-year LibreOffice contributor and Collabora employee — published a detailed account of how The Document Foundation’s “rump board” voted to eject over 30 Collabora-affiliated developers from TDF membership. These aren’t random contributors. They represent the majority of the project’s commit history.
🧩 Dumb Mode Dictionary
| Term | Translation |
|---|---|
| TDF | The Document Foundation — the non-profit that governs LibreOffice |
| Collabora | Company that employs most LibreOffice developers and sells enterprise support |
| Meritocracy | Governance where contributors with more work get more say (written into TDF’s own statutes) |
| Rump board | What Meeks calls the remaining board members who are overstaying their term |
| Membership Committee | The (controversially appointed) group that decides who gets to be a TDF member |
| FoundationModels framework | Unrelated — wrong article, ignore this if you see it |
📖 How We Got Here
LibreOffice forked from OpenOffice back in 2010 specifically because Oracle was freezing out the developers. TDF was created with meritocracy baked into its statutes — the people doing the work should have a voice.
Fast forward 16 years. The board now has almost zero corporate-affiliated members. The last coder on the board is a single developer named Laszlo. The current chair, Eliane, manages the Executive Director and is — this is not a joke — “curiously related to a staff member who is managed by the ED.”
For over two years, no Collabora employee or partner has sat on the board. Meeks says this was intentional — they wanted to give the board space to fix things. Instead, the board used that space to eject them entirely.
📊 The Commit Scoreboard
Here’s what the top of LibreOffice’s all-time commit history looks like:
| Developer | Commits | Affiliation |
|---|---|---|
| Caolán McNamara | 37,556 | Collabora |
| Stephan Bergmann | 21,732 | Collabora |
| Noel Grandin | 20,851 | Collabora |
| Miklos Vajna | 10,466 | Collabora |
| Tor Lillqvist | 9,233 | Collabora |
| Michael Stahl | 8,742 | Collabora |
| Kohei Yoshida | 5,655 | Collabora |
| Eike Rathke | 5,398 | Volunteer/RedHat |
| Markus Mohrhard | 5,230 | Volunteer |
7 out of the top 9 are Collabora. And they were all just shown the door.
🔍 TDF's Justification
TDF’s official response boils down to one line: people were “making decisions in the interest of their employers rather than in the interest of The Document Foundation.”
Okay but seriously — these developers weren’t making board decisions. They were writing code. Fixing bugs. Shipping releases. The membership committee (which was itself controversially appointed) decided to overturn election results and eject members “without any thanks or apology.”
TDF’s statement included the passive-aggressive gem that it “welcomes contributions” and “expects them to continue contributing.” Translation: please keep writing our code for free, just don’t expect any governance rights.
🗣️ What the Internet Is Saying
Hacker News commenters are overwhelmingly on the developers’ side. Top reactions:
- “Tyranny of structure” — Board members who are good at board politics pushing out people who are good at building software
- “Institutional passive-aggressive behavior” — The “we welcome your contributions” line was dragged hard
- “This is exactly what happened with OpenOffice” — Multiple people noting LibreOffice was created to escape this exact pattern. The snake eating its own tail
- One commenter pointed out that TDF and Collabora are now essentially competitors in the LibreOffice Online space, which may be the real reason behind the ejection
Almost nobody defended TDF’s decision.
⚙️ The Meritocracy Problem
TDF’s statutes literally require meritocracy. That was the whole point — after OpenOffice, they wanted to make sure “do-ers decide.”
Some current board members argue meritocracy just means a flat entry criteria (anyone can join). Meeks and the developer community argue it means those who contribute the most should have proportional influence.
The board has shifted from meritocracy to what they call “equality” — but in practice, that means the people writing 150,000+ lines of code per year get the same voice as someone who showed up to two meetings. And now, actually less voice. Because they got ejected.
📰 The Deeper Pattern
This isn’t just LibreOffice drama. It’s the same pattern that killed OpenOffice, fractured Node.js (into io.js), and has threatened dozens of other open source projects:
- Foundation is created to protect developers
- Foundation grows its own staff and bureaucracy
- Staff interests diverge from developer interests
- Board composition shifts away from contributors
- Contributors get pushed out
- Project either forks or slowly dies
We’re at step 5 right now. The question is whether step 6 involves a fork or whether Collabora keeps contributing to a project whose governance treats them like unwanted tenants.
Cool. An Open Source Foundation Just Kicked Out Its Own Developers… Now What the Hell Do We Do? ( ͡ಠ ʖ̯ ͡ಠ)
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Example: A freelance sysadmin in Poland set up a LibreOffice-to-Collabora-Online migration for a 200-person municipality after the 2024 governance concerns. Billed €4,500 for the assessment and migration plan alone.
Timeline: 2-4 weeks to build a migration assessment template. Start outreach now while the news is fresh.
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💼 Open Source Governance Auditing
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🛠️ Follow-Up Actions
| Step | Action |
|---|---|
| 1 | Read Meeks’ full post and the Collabora blog for primary sources |
| 2 | Monitor the TDF mailing list and board meeting minutes for fork signals |
| 3 | Check Collabora’s GitHub repos for any new standalone project activity |
| 4 | Join the LibreOffice dev IRC/Matrix channels — that’s where the real decisions happen |
| 5 | If you run LibreOffice in production, test Collabora Online as a backup now, not later |
Quick Hits
| Want to… | Do this |
|---|---|
 Read the primary source |
Check Michael Meeks’ blog post with full commit tables and board history |
 See the commit data yourself |
Run git shortlog -sn on the LibreOffice core repo |
 Follow the community reaction |
HN thread has 200+ comments, mostly siding with devs |
 Prepare for a potential fork |
Pin your LibreOffice dependencies and watch Collabora’s GitHub |
| Understand TDF’s side |
Their official statement is on the TDF blog — short on details, long on vibes |
They forked from OpenOffice because the foundation ignored the devs. Then they built a foundation that ignores the devs. The circle of open source life.
!