Open Source in 2026: The Fork Wars Are Getting Ugly

Project: Hermes IDE | GitHub Author: gabrielanhaia Something is breaking in open source. Not the code. The social contracts. The open-source world isn't collapsing from lack of funding or contributor burnout (though both are real). It's fracturing because organizations that built empires on community-written software decided the original deal doesn't work for them anymore. Forks are multiplying. Licenses are mutating. Lawyers are circling. The volunteer maintainers who actually wrote most of this code? They're stuck in the crossfire. The LibreOffice Purge The Document Foundation, the nonprofit behind LibreOffice, kicked all Collabora staff out of its governance and development process. Over 30 developers, gone. Some of these people had been contributing since the project forked from OpenOffice back in 2010. TDF said it was about conflicts of interest. Collabora, as a commercial company building products on top of LibreOffice (especially Collabora Online), had stacked up outsized influe