The Document Foundation is a non-profit organization that supports the development of LibreOffice, a free and open-source office suite. Established in 2010 by members of the OpenOffice.org community, TDF aims to provide a vendor-neutral platform for office software development, with a focus on the OpenDocument format. It is incorporated as a Stiftung (foundation) under German law.
TDF was created amid concerns that Oracle Corporation—which had acquired Sun Microsystems, the original sponsor of OpenOffice.org—might discontinue or limit its development, similar to the fate of OpenSolaris.
Organization
The Document Foundation has several governing bodies that oversee its operations: the Board of Directors, which represents the foundation and manages its day-to-day business the Membership Committee, which organizes elections and approves new trustees the Board of Trustees, who elect both the Board of Directors and the Membership Committee This structure reflects the foundation's commitment to meritocracy. Membership in the Board of Trustees is only open to those who have been determined to have made meaningful contributions over a period of at least three months, and who commit to continued active participation for at least six more months. Admission is by application and approval by the Membership Committee. , there are 139 members on the Board of Trustees.
Board of directors and team The Board of Directors has seven members and is elected every two years.
To manage day-to-day operations, The Document Foundation employs Florian Effenberger as executive director, who oversees a team of 14 staff members.
Advisory board TDF established its Advisory Board in June 2011 to meet with organizations offering substantial financial or other support
The initial members included: Freies Office Deutschland e.V., Free Software Foundation, Google, Red Hat, Software in the Public Interest, and SUSE (then part of The Attachmate Group).
History
Creation
The Document Foundation was announced on 28 September 2010 with the Foundation being governed by a "Steering Committee" during the phase of initial creation. The announcement received support from companies including Novell, Red Hat, Canonical and Google. In December 2010, The Document Foundation announced that the BrOffice Centre of Excellence for Free Software, the organization behind BrOffice joined the Foundation.
The Foundation also made available a re-branded fork of OpenOffice.org which was based on the upcoming 3.3 version, with patches and build software from the Go-oo fork. It was hoped that the LibreOffice name would be provisional as Oracle was invited to become a member of The Document Foundation, and was asked to donate the OpenOffice.org brand to the project. Following the announcement, Oracle asked members of the OpenOffice.org Community Council who were members of The Document Foundation to step down from the council, claiming that this represented a conflict of interest, leaving the community council composed 100% of Oracle employees.
Jacqueline Rahemipour, Co-Lead of the OpenOffice.org Board, stated:
When the project was announced, The Document Foundation did not exist as a legal entity. The Steering Committee wished to formally set up a foundation, and following research chose to establish the foundation in Germany.LibreOffice 50,000 Euro Challenge The Document Foundation accessed 2011-02-20 On 16 February 2011, a fundraising drive was announced to raise the €50,000 needed to create a German foundation.LibreOffice Community starts 50,000 Euro challenge for setting-up its foundation The required amount was raised in eight days.Thousands of donors contribute €50,000 in just eight days to The Document Foundation
After clearing legal requirements, the foundation was finally incorporated on 17 February 2012.
In 2026, TDF decided to renew works on LibreOffice online. The action created a rift between Collabora and TDF. Eventually the friction escalated to the point that TDF decided to revoke all Collabora representatives in TDF.
Reaction
In assessing Oracle's role in the events surrounding the establishment of The Document Foundation, writer Ryan Cartwright in late October 2010 said:
In October 2010 Linux Magazines Bruce Byfield suggested that the formation of The Document Foundation is just the Go-oo project reinventing itself to the long-term detriment of users.
In April 2011, Oracle announced its intention to move OpenOffice.org to a "purely community-based project". Oracle also terminated its commercial product, called Oracle Open Office. In the view of some these moves were a reaction to the formation of The Document Foundation, but according to former Sun executive Simon Phipps:
As of 2 June 2011 Oracle has relicensed OpenOffice.org under the Apache License 2.0 and transferred ownership of the project's assets and trademarks to the Apache Software Foundation.
The Document Liberation Project On 2 April 2014, The Document Foundation announced the Document Liberation Project as its second top-level project. The project developed from LibreOffice community work on interoperability with proprietary document formats. Its first library, libvisio, was started as a Google Summer of Code 2011 project to parse binary Microsoft Visio files. After related parser and converter libraries using shared APIs grew to more than ten, the work was organised as an independent project within The Document Foundation in April 2014.
The project aims to help individuals, organisations and governments recover documents stored in obsolete or undocumented proprietary file formats, and to provide conversion mechanisms to open and standardised formats such as ODF. Its libraries include import support for formats used by WordPerfect, Microsoft Works, legacy Macintosh applications, AbiWord, CorelDRAW, Microsoft Publisher, Microsoft Visio, iWork, Adobe FreeHand, Adobe PageMaker, StarOffice, QuarkXPress and several e-book formats. The project also maintains export and infrastructure libraries such as librevenge, libodfgen and libepubgen, together with tools for producing plain text, HTML, CSV, SVG and ODF output.
Applications listed by the project as users of its import libraries include AbiWord, Calligra, Inkscape, LibreOffice and Scribus. The project invites contributions in code development, reverse engineering and documentation of undocumented file formats, and the preparation of sample documents for regression testing. Participating libraries are released, among other terms, under the Mozilla Public License 2.0, a choice the project says is intended to ensure that new knowledge about file formats benefits all users.
Conferences Starting in 2011, The Document Foundation has organized the annual LibreOffice Conference, as follows:
2011 – Paris, France – 12–15 October 2012 – Berlin, Germany – 17–19 October 2013 – Milan, Italy – 24–27 September 2014 – Bern, Switzerland – 3–5 September 2015 – Aarhus, Denmark – 23–25 September 2016 – Brno, Czech Republic – 7–9 September 2017 – Rome, Italy – 11–13 October 2018 – Tirana, Albania – 26–28 September 2019 – Almería, Spain – 11–13 September 2020 – web conferencing – 15–17 October 2021 – web conferencing – 23–25 September 2022 – Milan, Italy & remotely (hybrid) – 28 September–1 October 2023 – Bucharest, Romania – 20–23 September 2024 – Luxembourg, Luxembourg – 10–12 October 2025 – Budapest, Hungary – 4–6 September 2026 – Pordenone, Italy – 10–12 September (announced)
References
External links
de:LibreOffice#The Document Foundation