The GNU project works because it’s a bunch of small packages that are each maintained by approximately one person each for free on their spare time.
LibreOffice is a complex office suite that essentially competes with a multi-billion dollar industry of complex office applications and services.
It’s also an open source project that has pretty much always depended on corporate sponsorship and a paid variant rather than having some other form financial backing (e.g., it never went the Wikipedia route of being completely free for everyone and only surviving on donations).
But if the sponsor is getting a tax write-off because of their donation to non-profit to do work on the project that they would have done anyways for their commercial product, then they are basically just using the non-profit to avoid taxes, and while I'm not a lawyer, it wouldn't surprise me if that is illegal, especially if the company also controls seats on the board of directors.
> a nonprofit may not be a great vehicle for some free software projects
I've frequently wondered if we need some new kind of structure for funding open source projects works kind of like a non-profit but is more lenient in some ways, like allowing some kinds of business transactions in addition to accepting donations, and maybe you don't get as much of a tax deduction for donating to it. I don't know exactly what that would look like though, and it would probably be difficult to get right.
The reality is free software office apps require significant professional development input. Apache Open Office is the obvious example.
It’s a classic version of the tragedy of the commons. If Collabora goes off to its own thing, I struggle to believe they will maintain the development rate with new devs, and without development the TDF sponsorship will fall off.
I hope we are not looking back in two years time regretting this.