Invitation and agenda for TDF board meeting on Tuesday, 2026-04-07, 1600 UTC (1800 Berlin time)

Dear Community,

I hereby invite you to our next TDF board meeting which takes place on Tuesday, 2026-04-07, 1600 UTC (1800 Berlin time) at https://jitsi.documentfoundation.org/TDFBoard

For time zone conversion, see e.g.:Time Zone Converter – Time Difference Calculator
Agenda:

Public section:

  • Community Q&A: 10 minutes
  • Welcome to Neil Roberts and Vissarion: 5 minutes
  • Update on the LibreOffice 26.2 download and donations: 5 minutes
  • Update on bugs related to LibreOffice 26.2: 5 minutes
  • Budget 2026: 5 minutes

Trustee/members-only section:

  • Nothing for this meeting

Board and MC only section:

  • Corporate tax filing 2024
  • Adjusting investments
  • Legal topic

Best,

Eliane Domingos

1 Like

Collabora’s announcement is not the topic?

The fact that Collabora Productivity would change focus onto something else has been a topic and a risk that has been taken in consideration quite a while ago.

Back in 2022 it was part of a risk analysis, due to precedent with LibreOffice Online, and a risk mitigation proposal has been shared:

In the “Contributors risk mitigation” section you will notice that, in a quite diplomatic way, it was already expected that sooner or later Collabora Productivity would focus its business interests on something else so we needed to prepare for that eventuality.

The majority of the board that at the time had interests in keeping TDF dependent on their own developers and more importantly, for them, they did not want TDF to contribute to LibreOffice Online which they recently forked. We had to content ourselves with another proposal containing clauses, imposed by the directors working for those companies, limiting TDF’s options in relation to LibreOffice Online but at least the risk mitigation process started with the employment of the first developers.

More developers have been employed since then and more will be employed soon so between TDF’s team, the community and a new ecosystem, working on a level playing field without imposing their interests on TDF and the community, we will be even more resilient than before.

This board, thanks to the much reduced influences from the interests of these companies (which in the meantime merged into one), had the opportunity to review the governance issues created in the past and to set clear rules to reduce as much as possible the risk that these issues will repeat in future by publishing the Code of Ethics and Fiduciary Duties, an updated Conflict of Interest Policy and the Community Bylaws.

The latter brings to TDF’s reply to their announcement:

The rules might be unpleasant but necessary to mitigate other risks that have been created in the past.

It could have been just a minor inconvenience for the people involved as they could have reapplied for membership once the issues had been settled but their contractor/employer decided on their behalf that TDF and the community did not want them anymore which is very far from reality.

Of course we all value their contributions, we all consider them part of the community and being temporarily not member of the board of trustees due to rules that are necessary to resolve past issues doesn’t change their status as very valuable contributors to the project.

Even if their contractor/employer decided to change focus they are very welcome to contribute to LibreOffice and to reapply for membership once the issues that have been dragging for way too long have been settled.

TDF has been preparing for a while for the expected change of focus of a substantial contributor and it is going to post more employment offers in the near future as well as opening opportunities for new partnerships to help supporting the growing interests in LibreOffice, on various platforms including web and mobile, and to make ODF the default format for governments around the world.

I hope this, based on my opinion and evidence I have access to, provides an answer to your question.

Paolo

2 Likes

Hi @PaoloVecchi ,

Oh, that is interesting - now that you/TDF has kicked us out - how did you know we would be leaving that far in advance? :wink:

Were you the only one not knowing about it that far in advance?

Odd as it seemed common knowledge at the time that your employer would ditch TDF and the community as soon as he thought his new product was commercially viable and he didn’t need the LibreOffice brand anymore.

He has done the same with LibreOffice Online so it was obvious he would do it again.

IMHO his choice to ditch TDF and the community was a strategic mistake then as it is now especially after Nextcloud has chosen to fork OnlyOffice instead of choosing Collabora Online stating:
"Libre Office is 35 years old and no longer the most innovative and fluid, you can also notice that in the browser.“

I’m not impressed by the fact that Frank blamed LibreOffice for the quality of a product that has been forked away from the LibreOffice community more than 5 years ago but I guess he was tricked by the initial question.

So I guess neither you nor your employer told your colleagues that you, former contractors and your employer, caused the issues that led to the inclusion of strict rules that mitigate the damages you created in the past and to avoid a repeat in the future.

I have the feeling that the 4 people that sent out the “thank you” messages did not read the articles of the Community Bylaws and/or purposefully set out to mislead the valued and appreciated contributors to think they were being kicked out as you are doing in your message.

It would have been great if your employer had an honest talk with his contractors explaining to them that serious mistakes have been made in the past, that his company is now willing to enter into a mediation with TDF and that things would have been sorted soon so that they could all reapply for membership.
Obviously that didn’t happen and instead your employer decided to carry on with his disinformation campaign damaging his own company and everyone else.

Then I don’t understand why you used “us” in your sentence.
You, and one of the former contractors, haven’t been member of the board of trustee for quite a while following non renewals due to, as shared by a former contractor of the company you are working for, matters that would have had serious personal consequences in less lenient organisations.

So it would have been correct to say “they have been temporary inconvenienced by having to reapply for membership once their employer and TDF have settled the issues that could have been settled years ago”.

More about it here:

1 Like

I saw this comment of: " have your employer explain it to you" a couple of times on this Forum a couple of times and almost replied to it a couple of times.

Explaining a sanction to a member, is the job of the board that is applying the sanction.
If you think people were not explained properly, then why did you or whoever was applying the sanctions not do a better job at explaining them?

Also personally, I find the expression “have your employer explain it to you” (me paraphrasing) to be a sign of contempt for the individuals that were expelled.

It’s not their employer that was a TDF member, it was them, those individuals, and you and others are the BoB. It’s the TDF board that owes an explanation to those individuals.

Also expressions like “have your employer explain it to you” and “their employer decided for them”, is assuming that those individuals are not adults and have no autonomy, and are not capable of making their own decisions.
That is contempt for those individuals.

Some time ago there was a company that made some decisions that a certain community did not like. And members of that community used their autonomy and decided for themselves to react, and “the hell” with said company.
And then TDF was born.

I was not there at the time, but several of the persons that you constantly imply that have no autonomy and have decisions made for them were.

Have a little bit more respect for the people that were expelled.

2 Likes

Dear @jazevedo,

there was no intent to show contempt at all, to the contrary it’s an invitation to clarify things also within an organisation that everyone appreciate and support.

Which we did in the email sent out to all members the 10th of February 2026.

The Membership Committee sent out also a reminder the 26th of February 2026.

We reiterated again the explanations in the members mailing list and here.

Did you read the emails, the other posts in this forum or the statements in TDF’s blog?

What is not clear about the need of implementing rules to avoid a repeat of damaging behaviours that put TDF at risk?

I think the issues, the why the rule was necessary, for how long it would affect the members and what to do were explained properly in the emails and here.

What I see here and in the mailing list are comments from people saying that they don’t like the rule but very little in terms of constructive feedback.

The few that provided constructive feedback had their opinion evaluated and actually contributed in improving the Community Bylaws.

I believe we did our part but, IMHO, also the managing director of the company that is contracting you has to do his part.

You keep using terms like “sanctioned” and “expelled” giving the impression that you feel something wrong has been done to you.

I agree it doesn’t feel right to have temporarily lost your membership but as soon as the legal issues between the company you are working for and TDF are settled you can reapply so it’s just a minor and temporary inconvenience.

That has been repeated several times but your employer might have negatively influenced your, and your colleagues, perception of the situation with his public post and possibly with internal messages.

That was good and I’m sure that most agree that a company should not impose its business interests on an Open Source project and even less on a Foundation as that would risk to kill the foundation and the community.

I wasn’t there either but I followed the events.
It was difficult to understand what was going on as naturally there were 2 sides claiming everything and the opposite of everything.

I’m sure that many read emails and posts and try to make sense of it out of all the noise and then take informed decisions.

I’m happy to say that many sent messages saying that they are relieved that we finally took actions to protect TDF and LibreOffice from the governance issues we had to endure while, unfortunately, there are other messages that show members that did not take in consideration all the information they received and just complained they don’t like the rules we had to implement regardless of what issues they have been written to solve.

The former are not bothered by their temporary loss of membership as they know we respect them, we appreciate their contribution and of course they are and will always be part of our community.

The latter don’t seem to care that much about the survival of TDF so it’s likely they won’t be interested in applying for membership again.

I do respect you and your colleagues and I hope you now understood that you haven’t been “sanctioned” or “expelled”. Yes you have been temporarily inconvenienced but as soon as things are settled you can reapply for membership.

:thinking:

mayebe related : ESC meeting minutes: 2026-04-02

[…]

  • Moderating this call from next week (Miklos)
    + have been trying to do the moderation of calls for the last years
    + next week on vacation, but after that will have no time for it
    + asking for help - if someone can take this role over.
    + reading through minutes from last week, subscribing to mentoring list
    where the weekly stats are, putting together the agenda & doing the
    moderation
    + we expect Collaborans to have less time to spend in the ESC call,
    probably there will be someone here.
    + thanks to all who have worked together so well in the ESC, lots
    of respect for everyone here’s service, competence & commitment (Michael)
    + assign this to TDF staff members (Cloph)
    + not so confident listening & minuting at the same time
    + people are quite patient here which is good (Miklos)
    + they were patient with me.
    + plans to step back from security ? (Heiko)
    + will help to co-ordinate things (Caolan)
    + ie. ask everyone what dates suit people
    + as with other orgs that have been here
    + comes to the fixes - will fix what we need to fix
    + say this is where the fix is - perhaps someone merges it for us
    + will figure that out over the next week or two
    + everything we have a fix for is currently merged
    + working on currently will announce on the list

I mentioned during the meeting, but will repeat here: It would be better to have the Q & A at the end of the Public section for two reasons:

  • It would allow people to understand what was already covered before speaking, and
  • Speaking first in these meetings is quite hard and it would allow averyone present to become comfortable first