Should TDF exist? [LWN.net]

Should TDF exist?

Posted Apr 20, 2026 19:34 UTC (Mon) by geofft (subscriber, #59789)
Parent article: Digging into drama at The Document Foundation

First off, thank you for this excellent article setting out the background.

This article reports multiple times TDF's directors claiming that certain decisions needed to be made in the best interest of TDF. However, TDF's mission is essentially to support LibreOffice development, and it's not clear to me that all of this mess and alienating the largest single contributing entity is helpful to that mission.

What I think is actually happening is that certain decisions need to be made in the best interest of maintaining TDF's existence as a charitable organization. It may well be true (subject to all the questions, of course, about what happened in the audits and which lawyers were involved) that getting rid of commercial contributors to LibreOffice is necessary to maintain the non-profit / charitable status. But the mission, one would hope, is not to maintain a legal non-profit; it is to actually accomplish some goals in the world, with the legal non-profit as a means toward that end.

If it is indeed impossible to maintain good relationships with contributors to LibreOffice, to have them involved in governance, to fund them to do work, etc. while being a charitable organization, then the obvious answer to me seems to be to renounce the charitable status and figure out some other legal structure, either a non-charitable industry association (whatever form that takes, the US would call this a 501(c)(6) instead of a 501(c)(3)) or perhaps even selling them to Collabora and then routing the proceeds plus all existing assets to some unaffiliated appropriate charitable cause, perhaps some other software non-profit in a related ecosystem. (In the US, at least, part of the deal with charitable status and the reason that only certain purposes are eligible for 501(c)(3) status is that, if the charity shuts down, funds can be permissibly sent to other legally-approved charities.)

Some time ago I looked into what it would take to set up a US 501(c)(3) for the purpose of OSS development. Apparently the IRS (the taxation department) does not look favorably on such applications, even if all the work you're doing is for the public good. I think I understand that point of view a little bit better now after seeing this mess: it seems like it would have been better for TDF to never have been allowed to exist as a charity than to end up owning important assets and not be able to permissibly do anything useful for its mission.

(To be clear, I think being in the shoes of the TDF directors would be tough and I'm not sure I would make good decisions here myself. It is very, very easy in basically all organized human endeavors to accidentally start working towards the sustained existence of the organized endeavor than the goals you set out to do. I am myself on the board of my local church, which is a 501(c)(3), and like many churches we are seeing dwindling funding compared to our maintenance costs, and it is genuinely hard to distinguish what is good for our mission vs. what is good for our existing congregation and the building we are all familiar with.)

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Should TDF exist?

Posted Apr 21, 2026 4:02 UTC (Tue) by Heretic_Blacksheep (guest, #169992) [Link]

I'd argue that putting Collabora (and other companies with similar conflicts-of-interest) in positions on the governing boards was a bad move to begin with. I've seen way too many charitable organizations become charitable in name only because monied interests usurped the charity's mission. When you're putting out a *product* that is in near direct competition with the charity you're governing, that's an inherent conflict. It becomes impossible to differentiate the two entities since they're effectively pushing the same thing without meaningful distinction. When a company is selling *services* around a product produced by a charity or community efforts (eg not much different than RedHat's and Canonical's service products) with a value-add and support services draw, that's somewhat different.

Collaborating with the charity (and volunteer communities) at a mutually safe distance keeps everyone's hands clean. No one is blocking non-members making meaningful contributions to LibreOffice where it actually matters. Governance separation merely ensures independence of mission for both charity and company (and prevents any meaningful allegations of an inappropriate tax status as others mentioned). Sure, there's a risk the charity will go in a direction the company doesn't like, but the alternative is a charity that's not really a charity. It becomes a repository to further corporate interests with a facade of community for PR. Ultimately the whole system fails as the community abandons the charity when they no longer have any meaningful say in direction. The company (or charismatic personality - it need not be a corporation) and community is in even worse shape than before.

Should TDF exist?

Posted Apr 21, 2026 7:52 UTC (Tue) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link]

The problem isn't contributions from commercial entities, the problem is contributions to commercial entities.

Should TDF exist?

Posted Apr 21, 2026 8:48 UTC (Tue) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (2 responses)

The standard approach to this is having a charitable foundation at the top that can accept charitable donations, and then have a wholly owned subsidiary that does the actual work. They have distinct boards and governance structures, though typically the foundation appoints the board of the subsidiary. The foundation contracts specific tasks to the subsidiary in line with the goals of the foundation, but the subsidiary can accept money from other sources to achieve goals not strictly in line with the foundation's charter.

In this case, the subsidiary could have also been shared with Collabora in a 51%/49% split. The arms length construction is very common. It also means the foundation can have no employees which removes quite a number of risks.

AIUI this was explored by TDF in 2020 but ultimately not adopted. But it probably would have avoided all this (as some people have apparently pointed out), which is precisely why this construction is so common. I understand that to technical people this extra layer seems like overkill, but it sometimes it really is best to separate the concerns legally. If you want your donations to be deductible it can be worth going through the hoops.

In NL tax deductible status is interesting for donors but doesn't really change which taxes you pay. This is clearly very country dependent. AIUI in Germany this status avoids corporation tax, whereas in NL Stichtingen never pay corporation tax. (It's tied to whether to pay dividends. If there are no dividends, corporation tax isn't meaningful.)

Should TDF exist?

Posted Apr 21, 2026 16:06 UTC (Tue) by bryan1975 (guest, #183385) [Link]

How 'recused' board members were ? Rules of Procedure list supervision of contracts, trademarks & more ...
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/WikiAction/history/TD...

Delegating the work to a subsidiary

Posted Apr 25, 2026 2:57 UTC (Sat) by DemiMarie (subscriber, #164188) [Link]

If this would work, I think it is the only option that makes sense here.

Should TDF exist?

Posted May 5, 2026 6:49 UTC (Tue) by cpitrat (subscriber, #116459) [Link]

Exactly that. This reminds me of a french non-profit against bullying which was reporting very proudly on the progress of bullying that allowed them to grow. The president was very excited and enthusiastic about that and projecting a fiture growth like a CEO would. It felt that, too them, the idea of _eliminating_ bullying, which should have been their ideal, had become inconceivable as it would mean the end of the organization.