He Co-Founded LibreOffice. They Just Expelled Him.
In 2010, he escaped Oracle and co-founded LibreOffice. Sixteen years later, his own foundation turned against him. This is the third time. None survived.
Half the market. Same death. Three times.
April 1, 2026. A membership committee in Berlin revokes the credentials of approximately 30 contributors to the world's largest open source office suite. Among them, seven of the ten most active core committers. One has 37,556 lifetime commits (contributions) to the project. Another co-founded it.
The decision is final. There is no appeal process.
The legal basis is a set of community membership rules adopted ten weeks earlier, by a vote of five to one. The legal basis is clear: If your employer is suing the foundation, you lose your membership.
The man who co-founded LibreOffice started the project in 2010. Oracle had just bought Sun Microsystems, the company that originally built the office suite. Oracle began shutting down Sun's open source projects one by one.
So he left and founded LibreOffice.
Sixteen years later, the institution he helped build is doing to him what Oracle did to him.
His name is Michael Meeks. And this is not the first time an office suite has died this way.