[WhyNotHugo]

Based on the article:

Some founders/directors kept using money from the foundation to pay their own private companies to get work done.

This is highly irregular: you can’t manage funds that aren’t yours and use those funds to buy from a company which gives you profit.

Legal council warned the of this irregularity, and nothing was made to change the status quo during years.

[shevy-java]

Isn't this theft, if true?

[blm126]

I wouldn't call it theft, exactly. Presumably work did get done. If I'm reading it right, its just a terrible conflict of interest. The board uses donations to pay companies to work on LibreOffice. That seems totally fine. Some of the board were running/part of companies that rely and work on LibreOffice. That also seems mostly fine? You want your board to represent your community. Then, those same board members directed work towards their companies.

That's definitely a conflict of interest, but I wouldn't call it theft unless you prove the foundation was getting a bad deal. Could the foundation have gotten the work done better or cheaper hiring non-represented companies? That's the question you have to answer to call this theft.

It doesn't seem that is really what the foundation is arguing though, so I'm guessing it wasn't that bad. It seems more their argument is that this violates the non-profit laws they operate under.

[overfeed]

> Some of the board were running/part of companies that rely and work on LibreOffice. That also seems mostly fine?

Those board members were elected by foundation members who also work for Collabora, so it was a privilege escalation from contributors to (controlling?) foundation board seats

[lmm]

> It doesn't seem that is really what the foundation is arguing though, so I'm guessing it wasn't that bad. It seems more their argument is that this violates the non-profit laws they operate under.

It may have been that bad. They don't really have to get into the messy arguments of "was this a fair price for this kind of contracting" because that kind of arrangement is inherently unethical, to the point that you can kind of assume it's embezzlement by default (which is why those non-profit laws are set that way).

[pessimizer]

It's a kind of corruption referred to as "self-dealing."

As directors of LibreOffice, they should be looking for the best deals for LibreOffice. Contractors (or any employee) are always (logically and reasonably) looking to do the least amount of work possible for the most compensation possible, so if as a director you use yourself as a contractor, your duty opposes your interests.

And if on the one hand you're being paid a flat salary (or no salary at all) for making decisions for LibreOffice; and on the other hand the worse the contracts you make with yourself are for LibreOffice, the more income you will receive, plunder is absolutely inevitable.

This is exacerbated even more with some nonprofit who is answering to an amorphous public who is funding it. They have no way of stopping you, other than withdrawing entirely.

[bigfatkitten]

At the very least it looks very much like corrupt conduct, even if it isn’t.

[worik]

No. They did the work. It is a corrupt practice, not theft