LO means LibreOffice, not LOOL, in case that’s why you’re asking this.
Why I included Collabora Online in my application is that my LibreOffice core developments help all online office suites and services based on LibreOffice, including all LOOL forks, especially COOL/NextCloud Office, other web technologies, like ZetaOffice Web, and all the other web services, portals with their integration.
You can read more about this NLnet fund here, which helped to create better OOXML/MSO text layout interoperability in LibreOffice and in all online office suites and services based on LibreOffice:
The application and the awarding happened while the board was working to satisfy MIchael’s request to have a marketing plan promoting the valuable members of the ecosystem in exchange of finally making available LibreOffice Online to the community in an usable way instead of playing with what has been described in comments and board minutes as “artificial scarcity”
You decided not to make the board aware that you were awarded funds explicitly targeted to improve and add features to LibreOffice Online at the time.
When it seemed like months of effort from the board and the marketing team delivered a good draft the marketing plan Michael decided to breach the agreement he had with the board and forked LibreOffice Online.
Even then you decided to say nothing about the funding to improve LibreOffice Online or to step in to deliver the contributions that you were being funded to develop.
At the time you were still working for CIB and started presenting the project funded to improve LibreOffice Online as LibreOffice WebAssembly. Then you setup allotropia and apparently the funding moved there but no changes were made to the purpose of the funding.
The information we received state that it happened in 2022 so you deceived the board and the community for 2 years confirming what previously stated.
You were fully aware of the issues with LibreOffice Online when you applied for and when you got granted the funds to improve LibreOffice Online.
You were fully aware that the scope of the questions in relation to LibreOffice Online were made to determine if it was a community project hosted by TDF with the scope of providing the community and all that wanted to use it a “user-centered free/libre open source software” as from our statutes or a commercial project benefiting from TDF’s brands and marketing reach.
Once we got the answer to that question you still promoted your project as a community effort and refused to clarify the scope of it even after the recent experience with LibreOffice Online.
Before the offer to clarify what LOWA was going to become for the community and the offer to find ways for TDF to fund the efforts, in January 2022 when the board was unaware you were still funded to improve LibreOffice Online, the 16/02/2021 I’ve answered to Michael’s comment in relation an article about LOWA stating:
I’m sure you would agree with me that we should avoid a future situation where:
a project is presented to the community as being made in partnership with TDF
the community expects for that project to be made available for free under the TDF umbrella
the main contributor withdraws the project from TDF’s community as it’s now its only mean to make money
It’s a very hypothetical situation but I believe we should set expectations right from the beginning and we should set rules so that there is a good and open relationship between TDF and the ecosystem but with clear boundaries which avoid future unpleasant misunderstanding.
Anyone is welcome to develop their own solutions based on LibreOffice Technologies but that should not give them the right to be called part of “The LibreOffice team” or to claim endorsements from TDF.
Even then you refused to clarify if your project is a commercial effort to create your own product based on LibreOffice Technologies or a community effort that relases an improved LibreOffice Online for all to use.
The 25/08/2021, while still being funded to improve LibreOffice Online, you clarified your intentions about it by announcing the partnership with Collabora Productivity:
It’s only in 2024 that the scope of the project has been clarified and it is now reflected in the page where the original LibreOffice P2P project, that was supposed to improve LibreOffice Online, is redirecting to:
That would have been the correct way to present your project to get funding and to establish a clear relationship between your project and the community but you choose otherwise.
During all these years and also while you were the board chairperson you pushed to kill LibreOffice Online, you voted to put it in the “attic”, attacked and badmouthed all those that wanted clear agreements between commercial entities and TDF, those that presented facts and evidence showing that certain behaviour were at best unethical and damaging both TDF and the community and even lead an investigation to find a fellow member of the board in CoI with LibreOffice Online while keeping secret your clear CoI.
support the idea to get some clarity here (Thorsten)
Now that we clarified the situation with LibreOffice Online and the improved version that has never delivered let’s clarify another project to avoid once again the same issues in the future.
Have you received funding to develop LibreOffice CRDT to make it a community project hosted and supported by TDF following its statutes for the benefit of the whole community or it will only become a product of the subsidiary of Collabora Productivity?
Could you ask NLNet to adjust the project page to reflect what your plans are?
Once again, TDF welcomes projects based on LibreOffice Technology but it is important to clarify the relationship between the projects run by a commercial entity and TDF as non for profit organisation as well as setting the expectations for the community and the users.
The community guidelines do not forbid to present facts and evidence and there is more that can be shared if you want to continue the discussion.
I’m not sure after all your done as member and chairman of the board you have ethical and moral grounds to lecture others on community guidelines.
Neither TDF, nor allotropia, nor anyone else could replace the dozens of Collabora developers, this was behind the ESC proposal and board decision. LOOL was an abandoned mainstream, and this was confirmed by the delaying process:
Florian’s question was based on the incorrect information. My for-profit open source company didn’t get any fund. I have not and do not sell any online service based on LibreOffice, from which TDF does not benefit. My non-for-profit contribution funded by NLnet has resulted in a high level of development of the LibreOffice core (unique interoperability!), which has an exceptional and irreplaceable importance for TDF, helping a lot to guarantee its revenues in the long term, also to sustain LibreOffice development, which cannot be said with such certainty for all contributions. And finally, atticization of LibreOffice Online happened before I knew if I should apply to continue developing LibreOffice (I worked for the Hungarian public administration, leading a small LibreOffice development team).
They are independent. allotropia’s project was a proof-of-concept P2P library integration for a very narrow area (comments), presented at FOSDEM:
TDF’s project plan was to help to create a P2P development framework to design important parts of a future P2P office suite, filling the gaps between research and development, starting this by hiring a P2P project manager/expert. The original idea:
So the first was a down-to-top, the second is a top-to-down approach for P2P, which could have eventually converged.
The only thing that is certain is that a working LibreOffice solution requires several orders of magnitude more resources than NLnet has given to the proof-of-concept and that TDF would have given to the project manager.
No specific proposal was presented to the board, as I wrote. If I mentioned NLnet, it was because of the positive example of how a small organisation with a lot of expertise can help the EC’s Next Generation Internet programme, also LibreOffice development, by carefully funding small projects.
If, in spite of all the checks and balances in our statues and their adherence to them, tendering is stalled for years, then the organisation should renew itself, maybe by outsourcing tendering to a more competent and impartial third party, if and when this is possible and a real guarantee is given to TDF. Behind my idea was more the frustration that TDF board cannot act for the public good and for the long term. This thread shows exactly how divided our community is, which I have been serving since 1998 or longer.
According to NLnet’s answer and my experience, it is not unusual. We are small teams of small foundations, companies or simply individuals working hard on free software development, and often ignores what the other is working on in good faith.
Moreover, the end result of the NLnet projects are often different. Complex software development projects require considerable research, and often the direction of development is revealed as they go along. I can’t even list offhand how many problems in my case have been found to be serious interoperability problems, not just stray ideas, because they have not yet been discovered by our own bug reporters. NLnet has explicitly allowed to change the development direction in such cases for the public good.
It seems, after updating of the NLnet project page by NLnet, all the information are correct with allotropia’s P2P project:
let me share again with you the actual general issues:
In relation to your specific case it seems like you completely missed the point of the query about your funding page.
Once again, we look at the facts and draw our conclusions based on the evidence and experience.
The companies Collabora Productivity and allotropia are rightly appreciated for their great contributions to LibreOffice and for publishing their own products based on LibreOffice Technology being them funded by their own clients, by public money through various funding mechanism or tenders (once we can restart them using compliant procurement processes).
The issues have always been with the individuals that served as directors in TDF’s board and didn’t clearly separate their personal/business interests or their support for friends with personal/business interests from the role they had as members of the board.
You repeated all over the places that you got funded to develop the “LibreOffice/Collabora Online typography” which is totally fine and welcome that you as individual or through your company contribute to Open Source software including LibreOffice.
The issue comes when then you should wear your hat as TDF director, starting to objectively and impartially look at facts and evidence and act in the best interests of TDF.
The query that Florian raised is totally pertinent as looking at the evidence we have in public, in the directors’ mailing list, in minutes and now also in the project title, description and your own blog, anyone could wonder if you were in conflict of interest and/or uninterested in evidence available to the board when voting for matters related to LOOL/COOL, as well as many other matters, and that should be looked after finding out information confirming that also others acted in conflict of interests while influencing the board and voting.
Your comments then seem to contradict the purpose of the funding you received.
Could you confirm if you asked for and received funds to contribute to both LibreOffice and Collabora Online but then you actually only contributed to LibreOffice?
Once again, I’m very grateful for your contributions but I believe it is in general important, especially when talking about public funds, to be clear on the purpose of funds you received.
So why did you vote for someone in the same position to be in CoI and you did not vote to confirm the various CoIs others had and that were validated also by the legal counsels?
You have Collabora Online all over your blog, you were a contractor for Collabora Productivity years ago and you never sold any services based on LibreOffice so according to the logic you approved with your vote you are clearly in conflict with LOOL/COOL.
I know it sound stupid but either that determination was correct and you are in CoI or it wasn’t and you voted for something that you didn’t evaluate with the due objectivity and impartiality.
Which one do you choose?
Was that TDF’s project?
That’s very new to me, could you point to that project agreed by the board?
It seems like you haven’t been following board matters for the past 3 years.
A brief recap: tendering has been stopped and contracts have been invalidated because checks and balances did not work. As it seem you haven’t noticed a little more than 3 years ago we received written confirmation from our legal counsels that things weren’t good and following that we received audits confirming it.
I did try to get the majority of the board, which included you, to get things sorted but only lawyers managed to get the issues noticed:
It would be great if after 3 years you started to act following your fiduciary duties and actually looked at facts and evidence before making statements of that type or before voting.
TDF could have achieved a lot more but overlapping loyalties and a toxic environment in the board kept getting in the way since many years according to minutes and documents written even before I joined the board.
As you well know the issues this board has to deal with could have been solved in 2022 removing also the opportunity of creating all the other issues that then piled on to the existing ones. You could have made the difference and supported motions to fix those issues but decided to believe the false narratives that you’ve been fed instead of objectively and impartially look at facts, evidence and legal advice.
So if you want to look at one of causes of TDF being unable to act in the past 3 years you just need to find the nearest mirror.
I do respect you as a developer and contributor to LibreOffice but honestly your contributions as a fellow board member do not inspire me in feeling the same level respect at all.
If you could start reading and even challenging in an objective and impartial manner the large amount of legal statements, documents and emails you have available, as I’ve kindly asked you and other new members of the board to do when you joined in 2022, then you could still be in time to contribute positively to allow TDF to fulfil its mission and goals.
This explains why I had to use Collabora Online in my application, “as part of LibreOffice Technology, the key for the digital sovereignty of open source online document editing.”
I was one of those who most regretted what happened to LibreOffice Online, as I expressed then and now, but I respected and still respect the ESC – our main professional body – proposal and the facts. Both the free software community, our users and TDF need a strong, actively developed open source online office suite which is based on LibreOffice. This is what is currently driving the development of LibreOffice, too.
Yes, TDF’s temporary budget item for a P2P project manager. Thanks for the bug report!
the NextCloud Office is nothing else than Collabora Online integrated in NextCloud as an add-on. The same applies for example for EGroupware and further applications with integrated online office. Thus your work is not for a usable LibreOffice Online but for a commercial product only.
There is no LibreOffice Online or an active source repository for it. That was first freezed and later sent to attic by those in the Board of Directors of The Document Foundation with a clear Conflict of Interest (CoI) in LibreOffice Online. They have put their own business in the first place and is a violation of their duties in their role as members of the board.
let’s cut through this gish gallop of random pastes and quotes, and get to the core of the issue:
me, like many other community members, tried very hard to keep LibreOffice Online alive & part of the project - I’ve tried (unsuccessfully) to discourage you from your very aggressive approach back then - alas
I’m a positive person - the outcomes of today are regrettable, but clearly not foreseeable in 2020
I had therefore included LibreOffice Online as one possible user of the WASM port - but as you’ve learned now, it was not funded (and therefore not leading to a CoI)
conversely, you’ve lobbied very hard for unlimited, free binaries of LibreOffice Online - to the obvious detriment of TDF & this community - while clearly being under CoI
I’ve never pushed to ‘kill LibreOffice Online’ - quite the contrary, I tried very hard to build bridges and repair. There were a lot of attempts, reaching out, granting extra time, asking for people to come fwd and take over the maintainership of that abandoned repo. In the end, to avoid having TDF knowingly ship insecure abandonware, the ESC agreed to atticise it.
It’s a mystery to me, how you can with a straight face be mad at people for trying to attract funding to the project (both LibreOffice and Online), after you were the primary reason to kill the Online project at TDF. Claiming that I deceived anyone here is entirely nonsensical - or perhaps what you really meant, is that you yourself didn’t understand anything that was happening back in the day? But it’s hardly me who can be blamed for that.
On your concern about using code funded by NGI Zero / EC money in a commercial offering: that is not just permissible (as per the MPL license), but explicitly encouraged by the funder: TETRA #2 Summer Build-up bootcamp | Next Generation Internet
I do understand that facts and evidence put your tenure as a director and as a chairperson in a very bad light but by carrying on trying to mislead the community doesn’t improve your position at all.
Talking about gish gallop I’ll briefly comment your points without “random pastes and quotes” as you know where to find the supporting evidence for my statements:
Tell me more about “artificial scarcity” and a “source only” agreement on which you commented even before I joined the board. Things were done in ways that didn’t match our statutes, I raised the issue and then the whole board worked on it.
You were indeed interested in keeping the status quo as you were doing business with LibreOffice Online, eg: Press Release: CIB and Crust Technology announce partnership - CIB Group
The outcomes for LibreOffice Online were either we kept it in an artificial limbo where TDF was hosting it and promoting it without actually making it “user-centered” as from our statutes or we ask to clarify the relationship between TDF and the project. In September 2020 the valuable member of the ecosystem decided to clarify the relationship.
3, The board learned that the funding to improve LibreOffice Online went on until 2022. Our inquiry led to changing the page of the funding, the 23/06/2025, to reflect the actual intentions that were masked as community project. So yes, you were clearly in CoI also on LibreOffice Online but you kept the real description of that funding secret while acting in CoI for years.
4, If you check your email archive you’ll find that I was working with the rest of the board to find a win-win balance between the commercial needs of the valuable members of the ecosystem and the need to fulfil our statutes by publishing LibreOffice in an “user-centered” manner.
In 2018, 2 years before joining the board, I was mislead to think, like others, that LibreOffice Online was a community project and that I should promote it also commercially to support the valuable members of the ecosystem. When I joined the board I then found what the real situation was, the board agreed that the issue should be solved and the valuable member of the ecosystem did it for us.
If I’m to be in CoI for my wrongly placed belief that LibreOffice Online was a community project in 2018, 2 years before joining the board, and to try to support the valuable members of the ecosystem then you confirm you acted in CoI for years while being a board member selling LibreOffice Online and then selling the forked version of LibreOffice Online.
There were no bridges to repair. Michael decided to breach the agreement and forked LibreOffice Online, that’s it. Then as you were being funded to develop an improved version of LibreOffice Online you could have disclosed that as that could have changed the situation a lot in terms of keeping the repositories open and allowing interested developers to join into a project that would have finally be seen as a community project. You choose to remain silent leading to the killing of LibreOffice Online and then promoting and voting its final demise when you were the board chairman while in CoI.
Then I never had concerns about NGI Zero funding projects that then lead to commercial offerings, my concern has only been about asking and obtaining funding for improving LibreOffice Online to deliver P2P and E2EE features, never deliver these features to LibreOffice Online and then just create a commercial product out of the features that should have been in LibreOffice Online.
Now that we asked, the project has been rebranded to reflect what happened to the 2 year funding you received for LibreOffice Online but you should get it corrected as in August 2020 there was no allotropia nor ZetaOffice.
You want to carry on trying to mislead the community and make public more of your wrongdoings or you want to take a break, reflect on the things you did and apologise so that we can restart a productive and mutually beneficial relationship without making the same mistakes?
Then to avoid future discussions. I see that LibreOffice CRDT still points to libreoffice.org, does that mean that you would allow TDF to work on it an release if as a community project or you’ll complain that it’s your employer’s commercial product and we must leave it alone?
@sophi Thu, Jun 26, 12:40 PM
[…]
26/06/2025 11:35, Alexander Thurgood wrote :
[…] All that being said, the entire exchange strongly resembles a
Spanish Inquisition or a witch hunt, which doesn’t give
a very good impression to the public, I think.
And I completely agree with you, I don’t like the tone
of some of the exchanges at all.
I think it’s very difficult to conduct these discussions publicly,
even if they must be for the sake of transparency.
The acrimony of some goes back a long way. TDF has suffered greatly in
recent years and is still suffering from certain behaviors; this doesn’t help
the calm of the discussions, unfortunately.