The Document Foundation

The Document Foundation is the German charitable foundation behind LibreOffice. Its imprint names the entity at Winterfeldtstraße 52, 10781 Berlin and states its legal form outright — a “gemeinnützige rechtsfähige Stiftung des bürgerlichen Rechts”, a charitable foundation with legal capacity under German civil law — with VAT number DE 295589870 and supervision by the Berlin Senatsverwaltung für Justiz und Verbraucherschutz, Stiftungsaufsicht.

The legal form settles the ownership question rather than merely answering it. A German Stiftung has no shareholders and no members who own it, so there is no parent to chase and no cap table to flip. The board of directors is elected from the project’s own contributors, and the foundation is funded by donations and corporate sponsorship rather than equity.

It was founded in 2010 when the OpenOffice.org community left Oracle, and it also hosts the Document Liberation Project, which builds converters out of proprietary file formats into ODF. LibreOffice itself ships under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 and is free in both senses; several companies, Collabora among them, sell support and derived products built on the same codebase.