The Document Foundation (LibreOffice)
Nonprofit foundation behind LibreOffice, the free open-source alternative to Microsoft Office.
On the record
Checkpoint: Euro-Office government RFP outcomes and LibreOffice Conference 2026 in Pordenone
The call
LibreOffice keeps growing on downloads and donations, but a partner split with Collabora and a new EU-backed rival fork are testing whether that growth holds.
LibreOffice is a free alternative to Microsoft Word and Google Docs that European governments use because they want to avoid relying on big American companies. It is hard to replace because European countries have written laws saying they must use open standard documents, which locks out Microsoft and Google from winning those contracts. Right now LibreOffice faces two big problems at the same time: Collabora, the company that does most of the actual development work for LibreOffice, split away in a dispute, and a new competitor called Euro-Office just launched that also targets European governments and even includes AI features that LibreOffice deliberately does not. The next year matters most: if Euro-Office wins government contracts away from LibreOffice in places like Denmark or Germany, and if LibreOffice's development team cannot recover from losing Collabora, then LibreOffice's position could fall apart quickly.
Why
01
AI pressure: ChatGPT, Claude, and built-in AI in OnlyOffice/Euro-Office. AI chat tools soak up generic drafting help, and rivals ship built-in AI while LibreOffice deliberately doesn't, by design. Could AI do the core job? Only partly.
02
Bigger players: Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. European sovereignty procurement rules keep Microsoft and Google out of many government contracts LibreOffice competes for. Could a giant copy it? No, they are blocked.
03
What protects it. ODF standard stewardship plus government procurement rules that favor open formats over Microsoft's format lock-in.
What would change this call
Euro-Office announces it won a national government migration contract in the EU. Shows Euro-Office is displacing LibreOffice in TDF's core government niche.
TDF's LibreOffice release cadence or feature set visibly lags after the Collabora split. Shows TDF lost development capacity it depended on from Collabora.
Denmark, Schleswig-Holstein, Copenhagen or Aarhus rollout stalls, reverses, or switches vendor. Shows government sovereignty mandates are not translating into durable LibreOffice adoption.
TDF's LibreOffice release cadence or feature set visibly lags after the Collabora split. Shows TDF lost development capacity it depended on from Collabora.
Denmark, Schleswig-Holstein, Copenhagen or Aarhus rollout stalls, reverses, or switches vendor. Shows government sovereignty mandates are not translating into durable LibreOffice adoption.
Key numbers
- €1,807,780 donated in 2025, up 30% year over year
- 44,809,742 downloads in 2025, a record
- Only 14-15 paid staff run the whole foundation
Named risks
- Collabora split could slow LibreOffice development velocity since Collabora was the largest code contributor.
- Euro-Office could capture EU government migrations that would otherwise go to LibreOffice.
- LibreOffice lacks built-in AI while OnlyOffice and Euro-Office ship it, risking enterprise buyer defection.
- Heavy reliance on volunteer and partner-contributed code leaves TDF's own headcount of 14-15 staff thin.
Rivals, as read in July 2026
| Rival | Direction | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Collabora | contesting | Split from TDF board early 2026; launched rival Collabora Office 26.04 in July 2026 |
| Euro-Office | gaining on | New EU-backed sovereignty suite, forked March 2026, stable release 9 June 2026, targets TDF's exact niche |
| OnlyOffice | gaining on | Ships built-in AI and stronger OOXML fidelity, called LibreOffice's closest peer as of 2026-03-31 |
| Microsoft 365 / Google Workspace | losing to | Structurally excluded from sovereignty procurement; Germany mandated ODF in Deutschland-Stack March 2026 |
Questions people ask
- Is The Document Foundation profitable?
- TDF is a German nonprofit, not a for-profit company, so profitability doesn't apply. It runs on donations: 2025 brought 140,593 transactions totaling €1,807,780 net, up about 30% year over year from 2024's €1,387,589, per its annual report published 2026-06-26.
- Could AI replace LibreOffice?
- Unlikely soon. LibreOffice's value is ODF standard stewardship and government sovereignty trust, formalized in Germany's Deutschland-Stack mandate in March 2026, not AI-replicable drafting tasks. TDF deliberately keeps AI optional via extensions like localwriter (Jan 2025) rather than building it in.
- Who owns The Document Foundation?
- No one owns it. TDF is a German nonprofit foundation incorporated 17 February 2012, governed by a Board of Trustees (139 members as of April 2025) that elects a 7-member Board of Directors every two years, run day to day by Executive Director Florian Effenberger.
- Is LibreOffice's biggest competitor Microsoft Office?
- Not in its core niche. Sovereignty procurement rules structurally exclude Microsoft/Google from many EU government contracts. The real live threats are Collabora, which split from TDF in early 2026 and shipped rival Collabora Office 26.04 in July 2026, and the new Euro-Office suite (stable release 9 June 2026).
- Is it safe for governments to rely on LibreOffice after the Collabora split?
- TDF revoked Collabora's Board of Trustees seats in early 2026 after a dispute over LibreOffice Online, per TDF's 2026-04-05 statement. Development capacity risk is real, but TDF still reports record 2025 downloads (44,809,742) and donations, showing continued institutional momentum.
- Is The Document Foundation laying off staff?
- No layoffs are reported. TDF employs roughly 14 to 15 paid staff as of mid-2026, a small figure since most LibreOffice code is contributed by outside partners like Collabora, CIB and allotropia rather than TDF employees directly, per foundation governance documentation dated 2026-07-22.
Timeline
- 2026-07-08Collabora Office 26.04 launches as independent product after TDF split
- 2026-06-26TDF reports record 2025 downloads (44.8M) and donations (€1.807M)
- 2026-06-09Euro-Office, a sovereignty-focused OnlyOffice fork, hits stable release
- 2026-04-05TDF publishes statement on Collabora rift, revokes trustee seats
- 2026-03-19Germany's Deutschland-Stack sovereign IT framework mandates ODF
- 2026-03Euro-Office forks from OnlyOffice, backed by IONOS and Nextcloud
- 2026-02-04LibreOffice 26.2 major release ships
- 2025-08-20LibreOffice 25.8 released with PDF 2.0 export and 30% faster loading
- 2025-01-16localwriter local-LLM extension for Writer released
- 2012-02-17The Document Foundation formally incorporated as German foundation
Revision history
23 July 2026
First assessed. Defensible for now. The text above is fixed as of this date and is not edited afterwards.
In the same band
Sources
- LibreOffice 25.8: smarter, faster and more reliable (2025-08-20)
- LibreOffice Downloads and Donations in 2025, TDF Annual Report (2026-06-26)
- Let's put an end to the speculation (2026-04-05)
- European Governments Shift from Microsoft to Open-Source Software for Digital Sovereignty (2025-06-18)
- Denmark's Digital Ministry shifts from Microsoft to LibreOffice
- Policy and Digital Sovereignty, TDF Annual Report 2025 (2026-07-07)
- Germany's Sovereign Digital Stack Mandates ODF (2026-03-19)
- Market Share, Competitor Insights in Office Suites
- LibreOffice 26.4 Beta Experiments with AI Writing Features (2026-05-04)
- localwriter: An optional LibreOffice Writer extension for local generative AI (2025-01-16)
- AI extension: Stable Diffusion image generator for LibreOffice (2025-08-17)
- Which One Is Right For You? (2026-03-31)