Something that is dismaying to me about this situation is that, on one hand, the anti-Collabora arguments are not unconvincing: the situation with Collabora and the foundation seems to have been dubious at best, and I would not be surprised if their legal worries are well-founded.
But on the other, in arguably trying to address the problems, the anti-Collabora side seems to exhibit a distressing lack of honor and decency. The dismissal of voting results that didn't go their way, the malicious misreadings of member votes against their proposals (eg, deciding "If the Board majority group insists on proceeding with this misguided and premature motion, I vote NO" was not a vote against the proposal because the motion was "neither misguided nor premature"), the arguments that complaints about their behavior violate community standards and are are not sufficiently respectful of the work they do, the toxic, patronizing, dismissive statements toward developers and others... even if they are right, I do not understand why they need to behave the way they are behaving.
The earlier threads from the Collabora side were also disappointing in how childish all of their arguments were structured. I read their posts and could barely understand what was being claimed in between all of the sarcasm and attacks, and I wasn't alone in the comments here.
From the outside, this entire situation is obviously very heated. What seems to be missing is some adults in the room who can turn down the tempers, get everyone to take a beat, and then start coming to some reasonable compromises.
Instead it feels like we're seeing the inevitable boiling over of passionate people who couldn't work well together and failed to find ways to cool off and work together.
AFAICT from TFA the arrangement with Collabra was illegal. I think the frustration was that there is no vote to be had on how to proceed in a way that
continues to be illegal. You can vote for a reform you can propose another actionable reform, or you can be thrown out.. And here we are?
I wish this was more clearly written. Maybe I missed something, and I guess this is supposing the reader already has a lot of background, but there are several points that confused me.
"At the time, nobody could imagine that the companies that had supported OpenOffice.org until then would create a project to kill LibreOffice."
Did they mean... to kill OpenOffice? Or had supported LibreOffice would want to create a project to kill it later? Because that fact that companies who had previously supported OpenOffice then switched to LibreOffice doesn't strike me as odd, given the situation with Oracle back then. Also, what is the "project" that is trying to kill LibreOffice?
I am not clear on how the Board of Directors differs from The Document Foundation (are they just the Board of Directors of The Document Foundation then?).
What is "TDC"? It is not even clear what that stands for, nor what this "parallel organization" was supposed to do and how it differed from The Document Foundation. And if "the plan to transfer many of TDF’s tasks and assets" to "TDC" didn't happen back in 2020, why is it being brought up here? But then the next paragraph talks about the transfer so it did happen the year before? But then was terminated? Again though, I don't get why it matters now except maybe that some people were upset by that move over five years ago.
"This attempt resulted in permanent damage to relations between the project’s components, and especially between certain BoD members and the team."
Who is "the team"? The Document Foundation?
"After years of discussions marked by accusations and finger-pointing, during which no real progress was made in resolving the legal issues, the authorities requested an audit..."
Who are "the authorities" requesting the audit?
A "third audit" was mentioned, but it is unclear if the one audit mentioned above in the post was that third one or one of the previous ones (describing these and when they happened would have helped).
I still have no clue as to what Collabora's relationship was and is to The Document Foundation.
They apologize for the need for this post, but I don't really understand why. I get the idea that, given their non-profit nature, there were issues, but making those more clear seems laudable (even if I don't think the post especially helped in doing so).
IBM has created Apache OpenOffice to kill LibreOffice. The Document Foundation has a Board of Directors. The TDC project damaged the relations between companies and community. The Document Foundation has a team. The authorities are the German authorities overseeing not for profit foundations. The third audit in 2025 was after the first audit in 2023 and the second audit in 2024. Collabora is a LibreOffice ecosystem company. All of the above has been explained at lengths in the project's blog, chats and mailing lists.
Thank for the clarification, but it all should really be in that post if your goal is to try to persuade people of your argument (and "put an end to the speculation" about what happened), since people who don't know the background will have no clue where to find that info. At the very least links to those earlier posts are needed. And I say this as someone who uses LibreOffice daily both for work and my personal uses, someone who really hopes LibreOffice will succeed. Hopefully all this works out.
"explained at lengths" ... do we need to care to read all of that when someone "summarised" it for us in poorely written post?
Also - correct me pls if I'm wrong – but I recall it was Oracle that gave OpenOffice to Apache foundation after its acquisition of Sun.
If these people kill LibreOffice, someone at MS Office365 will cork a champagne ... What a cluster!
At the time, Oracle wanted to completely drop OpenOffice.org, but there was a contract with IBM which could use the source code to produce their proprietary Symphony office suite. Because of this contact, Oracle was not able to drop OOo and had to follow IBM's request to give the source code to ASF to create Apache OpenOffice. IBM openly declared the intention to kill LibreOffice during a call with The Document Foundation Steering Committee on April 30, 2011. I was in the call, and I regret I did not record the call.
The situation is incredibly complex, and explaining it in full would need a book. The blog post is clear enough for the prople who have followed LibreOffice as a project, while other people have to do some research to understand all the details.
As a person who refuses to use “free” cloud products, and won’t even consider Office on Windows, I’m a big fan of LibreOffice. I’ve donated a few times over the years but probably not enough.
I’ll be sad if there’s not a free & local “office” solution available.
That said, my eyes crossed trying to read this. Do I need to ask an LLM to read the various messages and tell me what’s going on? ;-)
I don't know about any of the drama happening, but if LibreOffice ceases to exist, there's still Softmaker FreeOffice as a free & local option. It's nothing fancy, but works for the times when I have to use one. I'm not against cloud products as you are, but it's nice being able to do stuff locally sometimes, it's just more convenient.
OnlyOffice also seems to have a lack of clarity in regards to the ownership of the org (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47100599) but in general I think they're in the right here - you can't just ignore parts of a software license selectively because you feel like it. Oh and I liked their software when I did try it out, except LibreOffice seems like a slightly safer bet (though I'm also not as sensitive to the way its UI is).
I should also disclaim that I only need these office suites for occasional home use. If one of them disappears tomorrow it’s no big loss to me personally, not that I wouldn’t be sad about a loss of consumer choice.
If I need something for a business that I’m going to depend on I’m just gonna give Microsoft ten bucks a month, hate to say it. Office is really better than any of these options by a long shot. I also find the Google suite to be really good and free as in beer.
> I’m just gonna give Microsoft ten bucks a month, hate to say it.
After having used MS Office for a while, I have to admit that LibreOffice just feels more pleasant to me, when I don't need exact MS compatibility - the UI is customizable, Calc doesn't mess up CSV files when I open them, Writer also has most of the features you need and exporting PDF files is nice and has none of that OneDrive bullshit with them almost trying to hide your local file system as some secondary target.
That said, in some hardware configurations LibreOffice has slow and laggy rendering (you have to mess around with rendering settings, hardware acceleration and Skia and so on), some features like bibliography have broken on me in odd ways, and Impress can be a bit slow for larger presentations. OnlyOffice feels like it has more polish in regards to how approachable the UI/UX might be to a MS user, but feature wise isn't that far off.
I personally wouldn't reach for MS Office unless I wanted it as a part of their overall groupware - mail, Teams, AD and a bunch of other integrated stuff (though aside from AD, most other things feel a bit jank, like the new Outlook or Teams in general when compared to Slack).
There are many good options for text editing, some for presentations, but what about spreadsheets? Using Python/R/SQL everywhere ain't no panacea, spreadsheets are really useful in some cases and LO has the best implementation I've seen apart from Excel.
If LibreOffice ceases to exist, won't the old installers still work? Is it forkable to a new project? I seem to remember that it was Star Office then Open Office then LibreOffice.
I think such situations are rather big risk that a community that already wasn't very active atrophies or splits and then atrophies. With code bases like that there's also a lot of maintenance so being able to run an old version is not necessarily enough.
What maintenance are you talking about? I'm quite sure I could open any document on my computer with a libreoffice version from ten years ago. The functionality doesn't magically rot away...
The questionnis: How does a community form, which can take a project tof that size? TDF andjvre Office cMd out of a long process of independent (from Sun Microsystems) contributions to OpenOffice, which at some point had a momentum to do a proper form and then another momentum to take over as the lead variant.
For a successful fork you need a notable amount of people engaging in the fork.
I’d love for someone to be able to take it from “yeah it mostly works for me” to “oh fuck you Microsoft, I’m going to move our entire company over to this”.
Boggles the mind that corporates stick to expensive, inefficient, insecure and in so many ways crap software. SQL Sever, Office, Oracle (any product), Windows servers and workstations - yet demand peak efficiency from staff.
because thats not about quality, its about "i demand something thats 100% exactly the same as microsofts product, even in the places where its objectively crappier. I also wish it to track the microslop so that it consistently stays as shitty as microslop deems, so that I may never realize I use something else."
This is the kind of attitude that stops OSS from becoming widely adopted. If simply shipping a quality office suite was enough, this problem would have been solved last millennium. (WordPerfect fuckin' slapped) And in fact, there are many quality office suites.
Organizations choose Office because it:
1. enables interoperability with other organizations
2. has a commercial throat to choke
3. has an existing pipeline of workers trained on it
4. has a deep feature set for edge-case power-users
5. integrates with other products and services that their customers want
Every institutional office-migration project runs into these issues -- they're solvable, but damn if OSS advocates stopped pretending they didn't exist, they might actually fix them. LibreOffice/TDF is the closest anyone has gotten thus far in this regard.
curious that item zero is missing.. for specific example, long ago.. Brazil was in the middle about modernizing using desktop computers, language translations, support, and a large dose of polarization about depending on American products. So many kinds of Office software were being tested, including of course the MSFT products. This story is from the late 90s.
One day, as much as I am aware, the entire national phone company of Brazil switched to using MSFT Office only, by decree from upper management. Why? much later, some correspondence between upper management / C-Suite at the company, and Brazilian attorneys hired by MSFT to negotiate, showed large, opaque payments, long-term discounts, and added support services, in exchange for changing to ONLY MSFT Office products. The change did in fact happen.
Use your own brain and understand that MSFT has able legal and business teams, hired in the target country, that have large incentives based on closing sales. Those sales are closed using negotiation language and incentives that are appealing to the C-Suite and their banking and legal partners, period.
I do not see this reality reflected in the too-neat summary of drivers there.
As if it is somehow MSFT's fault that others failed to do the same?
"Build it and they will come" is a falsehood proven over-and-over by a long history of dead startups who died before they ever figured out how find market fit. It doesn't matter how good your software is, if you don't convince people to use it, you won't have users.
Look at Red Hat, GitLab, etc for examples of how to make OSS successful.
> "so that I may never realize I use something else"
The main reasons are:
1) ... so my muscle memory work. (In some editor Ctrl+Y is redo, in others no, I never remember in which editors, I hate when it doesn't work.)
2) ... so I can exchange files with coworkers, and they will see exactly what I wrote (I recently received an email with a draft and I complained about a missing ≥. It actually was there was the visor in Gmail was not showing it.)
Well, it exists but got one patch release (fixing 7 CVEs and little more) in 2025, no release in 2024, two patch releases in 2023. Not a really active project. Also most of the community moved on.
Apache OOo is dumped by Oracle and since then didn't receive much love.
> I’ll be sad if there’s not a free & local “office” solution available.
I think a free open source suite will always exist. But probably slow down if existing open source solutions handicap progress for whatever the reason(s).
They should focus on making the office suite much more useful and powerful and wide-spread. Like ffmpg+mpv!
> at the same time accusing others of historic conflicts of interest
Collabora clearly has a conflict of interest, as their Collabora Office products both benefit from, and compete with LibreOffice proper. They even allude to that conflict of interest in the next sentence:
> overriding past board and engineering steering committee decisions and violating their own processes to drag code out of the attic to enable competing with their largest single contributor
A non-profit dedicated to promoting open source software should do what is best for that project and its users regardless of if doing so steps on the toes of corporate sponsors.
"Collabora clearly has a conflict of interest, as their Collabora Office products both benefit from, and compete with LibreOffice proper."
But that was the point of TDF: being an umbrella for the community and the commercial partners. Commercial partner having its own interests is something that was expected and encouraged as long as the work would be done for the common good on the LibreOffice codebase. For the TDF itself there are COI policies in place as well from the very beginning.
"A non-profit dedicated to promoting open source software should do what is best for that project and its users regardless of if doing so steps on the toes of corporate sponsors."
That kind of thinking is what brought this result - especially when the corporate and the non-profit are supposed to be partners and work together for the common good. The result should be dialog to find a compromise that would work for both sides. So in this case forcefully reversing a previous decision and ignoring the de-atticisation rule (having active developers working on the code-base) was a needless aggressive move that just worsened the situation. And the reason for the move according to the TDF board was to "start the discussion".
Note that the proper procedure for de-atticisation of the LOOL codebase would be to confirm there is notable developer activity. Users wanting LOOL is NOT enough and the TDF board has clearly ignored one of its own rules.
This plausibly demonstrates why a nonprofit may not be a great vehicle for some free software projects - while the nonprofit should do whats best for the project, if the main work is done by commercial sponsors then it’s crucial those sponsors feel the relationship is beneficial.
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.
> if the main work is done by commercial sponsors then it’s crucial those sponsors feel the relationship is beneficial
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.
You're considering open source development as just another commercial endeavor. The fact that this is done by a nonprofit organization means it's pursuing goals that are not strictly commercial, and that is fine. Think about the GNU project as another example. If someone is not happy with that, it is always possible to start their own company.
I don’t think they’re considering it a commercial endeavor, they’re just acknowledging that complex open source projects often require paid work to effectively maintain and develop them.
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).
If a text editor is not smaller than an office suite that handles Excel spreadsheets, PDFs, Word, PowerPoint, and Access databases, I made the right choice never using it.
I'm unclear on the relationship between Collabora and LibreOffice. Some of the earlier stories on this described TDF as ejecting LibreOffice core developers.
My understanding is that Collabora is an online collaborative office suit based on LibreOffice, with commercial support available and managed cloud hosting. It is also available fully open source and supports self-hosting if you don't want their commercial services. Their developers contribute back to LibreOffice.
What I think of when I think of core developers of an office suite are the people developing the word processor itself and the spreadsheet itself and the other core applications.
Did the ejected developers work on those, or did they only work on things built on top of then or other other non-core things? If they were working on the core applications how many non-Collabora people also work on them?
> Did the ejected developers work on those, or did they only work on things built on top of then or other other non-core things?
Yes, they worked on the core. According to Collabora's stats (from their perspective), they contribute more than half of the documented features from the release notes for LibreOffice 26.2 [1].
Collabora's own online version of LibreOffice lies in another repo [2], which presumably contains code specific to their own product built from LibreOffice. They seem to be moving toward a (maybe soft) fork of LibreOffice, while setting up their own Gerrit instance [3].
Not sure myself, it seems like some of the founders were kicked out in 2025 for "misuse of funds" according to the auditor of TDF / or the Foundation authorities?
Also found this in the annual report, sounds quite serious:
> In 2023, following a request by the Foundation Authorities in Berlin, given the size our foundation has grown into over the last decade, TDF was audited, and a report was sent back to Berlin. The Board of Directors is working with the authorities to implement the improvements suggested by the audit
Yikes. They set up the foundation in Berlin, Germany? A country well known for its braindead tax laws and bureaucracy, particularly when it comes to NGOs?
It's stated as conflict of interest, not some bureaucracy.
Things are still vague, due to some legal liability, probably. Sounds to me like for some grants/tenders received by the non-profit were contracted out to Collabora. Which in turn, profits from the base project.
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.
> 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
> 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).
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.
Can someone enlighten me what's been going on in the open-source office application space lately? Here we have LibreOffice and Collabora parting ways; meanwhile NextCloud used to integrate OnlyOffice until v18, then started integrating Collabora in v19 (and also in the recently announced stack for openDesk and "Office EU") but then the other day NextCloud announced they'd fork OnlyOffice to create EuroOffice, … which clearly neither Collabora nor OnlyOffice seem to like?![0]
Please just tell me what the canonical stack is that I'm supposed to use these days. I still have scar tissue from the OwnCloud vs. NextCloud situation…
Collabora is the blessed one currently, but you can use either, it supports either one, and you can easily swap them. The EuroOffice image will likely default to OnlyOffice, but NC has not announced any plans of switching that to the default. It could change in the future, but I don't foresee them discontinuing support for either if they have any say in it.
The EU is unleashing billions of euros to drop US controlled software this year and beyond. This means TDF, Collabora and NextCloud are tripping over themselves to scoop up the funds as non-American Office Software alternatives to Microsoft.
I run NextCloud (dockerised) at home so that I can easily share links with friends and that currently uses OnlyOffice (https://www.onlyoffice.com/). I self-host the OnlyOffice container with its own URL and setup NextCloud to link to that.
To be honest, I never use it, but just set it up as it seemed to be part of a decent NextCloud install.
I use and promote Libreoffice instead of cloud SaaS and M$ religiously and have been doing so for decades. While it does feel that 'peak office suite' is solidly in the rear-view mirror and the majority of tools are becoming ~irrelevant (nobody does physical meetings anymore, writer < LyX and spreadsheets are being supplanted by custom code with better visualization control and web integration), I still need Writer to deal with lawyers and their 'change tracking' and 'comments', and Calc for presenting 'give me money' financials to investors. Is there now a preferred fork we should follow?
Maybe within the strict confines of these cases made by Microsoft, which also have inherent monopoly designs behind them.
Office documents are still fundamentally opaque to data extraction and generation. The user interfaces of the components are still heavily restricted to dedicated applications as opposed to providing some sort of means of embedding them in other contexts such as gasp a web page that might have an actually good Excel interface.
And I would say in general llm should be a massive boon to closing the compatibility gap between free office applications and the barriers put up by proprietary ones, particularly format. Parsing and saving
If we can have an office document foundation similar to what Labor office does to provide generalized libraries and code for parsing office document formats saving them across many platforms, something that just piecemeal across most programming languages and environments, it could be a huge boon to open days formats represented by these relatively important file formats:
The spreadsheet
The word document
The presentation
The flowchart/chart
Well, Microsoft with things like OLE kind of pushed some of these capabilities across the Microsoft ecosystem. That sucks and it failed because it was within the Monopoly.
I'm not following this, but having drama in an office suite dev team sounds funny to me. I just want to open an occasional word doc and sometimes make a spreadsheet.
I didn't see direct evidence that he was a predator, but he and Epstein appear chummy and he sought career and legal advice from him. His girlfriend goes way back with him.
I have no idea what they are talking about. But is now clear that the TDF filed the lawsuit against Collabora, and then based on changed bylaws expelled the Collabora members. Suicidal tendencies.
Also, the future of LibreOffice is extremely bleak now. No further development, no maintainance, and losing the biggest contracts to a strong competitor, OnlyOffice.
Which is kinda unfortunate for us now. The TDF keeps the name, just as Sun did with OpenOffice. And Collabora has to find a new name. Which was already done 11 days ago: https://gerrit.collaboraoffice.com/plugins/gitiles/core/
But can they win back the EU contract for OnlyOffice?
> Ideally, we would have preferred to avoid this post. However, the articles and comments published in response to Collabora’s and Michael Meeks’ biased posts compel us to provide this background information on the events that led to the current situation.
> Unfortunately, we have to start from the very beginning, but we’ll try to keep it brief. The launch of the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation was handled with great enthusiasm by the founding group. They were driven by a noble goal, but also by a bit of healthy recklessness. After all, it was impossible to imagine what would happen after September 28, 2010, the date of the announcement.
Seems to be a common theme with open source projects that the maintainers think people care about them and their drama way more than they actually do. Sort of the same way that dealing with open source always ends up being a waste of time. This intro is a disaster; completely unclear, gives 0 context, assumes the user knows all the drama, and signals that what follows is going to be a long, drawn out and pointless mess.
Heck I hope this doesn't result in a bug fork happening; it's already a PITA to deal with fixing bugs that have been inherited from OOo bug trackers or earlier.
You hit things like wanting to test against a file that used to be in a long dead bug tracker.
I feel like this was written by somebody who thinks we've been in the room the whole time while things happened. It's so dense with allusions that nobody is going to be able to understand.
What is this even about?
- A licensing controversy with some cloud companies who used libre office's software?
Michael Meek’s referenced blog post. The irony is I remember him championing openness for OpenOffice and I remember how transparent he was when he helped found libreoffice and TDF. What a shame we have devolved to this situation.
In terms of communication: The only clearly communicated message is that TDF is not fit for fulfilling its purpose and likely never have been. As an outsider I would suggest ceding the project and IP to a third party not involved in the historic squabbles and infighting. It would be a service to the community and enable the project flourish!
This entire fucking mess is a bunch of people writing open letters at each other that nobody outside of the closed system can parse at all. All of these stupid posts just make everyone involved look childish and incompetent. They seem to be comprehensible only if you're already too entrenched on one side to be swayed by anything, much less this horseshit.
Just to be clear, the source code exists and none of this matters to most of us. When these idiots get tired of fighting everyone will just be pillaging the corpse and moving forward as FOSS always does.
Can someone write a tl:dr; about what’s going on? I am
a very satisfied user of LibreOffice, and some of the comments here, suggesting we will need an alternative, are troubling.
Not taking sides here. This communication could have been, far, far better handled had a crisis-PR person, or frankly any decent PR person, been involved.
tl;dr the non-profit had acted outside the regulations for non-profits, to the benefit of some members and due to over eager action not actual dishonesty. Audits caught up with them, they have to change their ways.
Considering that office suites are software from a bygone era, born from the idea of letting untrained secretarial staff use a PC as an advanced typewriter and calculator, the business and the squabbles surrounding them, which have absolutely nothing to do with FLOSS, are frankly laughable, if they weren't so pathetic.
LibreOffice (and any office suite) is a piece of software as massive as it is absurd, and those who use it don't even realise it, which is why there's so much business built around it. It's 2026; information shouldn't be managed in scattered files designed for printing and then used on screens anyway. It's high time people were taught how to actually use a computer, rather than playing around with software that hoped to make computers usable for those who don't know how to use them, and has done more harm than good in the process.
If you like drink interested PRs dreams on sale yes, but reality is quite different.
The OEMs who have lied https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/der2024_en... through their teeth about the lifespan of a well-made desktop to compare it to a smartphone are simply on their last financial legs; their Nazi wet dream doesn't scale. A society like that doesn't work. That's why they'll collapse just like their German-speaking counterparts did a few years back.
The West is collapsing to save four kleptocrats and their model of exploiting us all; nature doesn't give a toss, it carries on her way and so does technology. Dead wood can stay standing for a long time, in some cases it even becomes a fossilised trunk, but it doesn't evolve; it's still a dead branch.
If you think the current Office model will be replaced by some LLM, you're dreaming just like those who hope for it and are working to make it happen. Sure, plenty of jobs are no longer necessary and gradually mankind, if we don't commit suicide first, will end up only creating new knowledge while machines apply it, but this model only works if it's open, distributed, and diverse enough to be resilient and evolve. The current monochrome model can only flare up and die.
I have no idea what this drama is about, but it feels a lot like the kind of thing no one has time to even be interested in. OpenOffice and LibreOffice already feel irrelevant and dated to begin with. What’s the point of people paying attention to this battle if they’re not insiders? There are so many other options, although none truly open source I guess.
LibreOffice almost seemed irrelevant; with cheap to free (*included) tools in abundance, such as MS Office, Google Workspace, Apple Pages/Numbers/Keynote, the need for LibreOffice is not what it once was, back when StarOffice and OpenOffice were liberating people from the tyranny of Microsoft.
It's still the only free as in freedom office suite option I'm aware of. I do try my best to avoid needing such software at all (I prefer to stay inside vim), but it has its uses when dealing with files from other people, or niche stuff like importing XML and saving as a CSV.
Gnumeric is great. It's the only one that holds up with massive CSV files and remains snappy. So I tend to prefer it. Functions are more limited than Calc though.
About 10 years ago the Ubuntu package manager borked my installation of LibreOffice (or maybe it was OpenOffice then). I only used it for spreadsheets and Gnumeric was able to open the ODS files just fine. There was only one function that I need to change (DaysInYear for handling leap years).
If for any reason I have to go back to it, I think I can.
None of the tools that you mentioned except for LibreOffice and OpenOffice are free-as-in-freedom, and if you’re using Linux on the desktop, then Microsoft Office and the Apple iWork suite are unavailable as desktop applications.
Something that is dismaying to me about this situation is that, on one hand, the anti-Collabora arguments are not unconvincing: the situation with Collabora and the foundation seems to have been dubious at best, and I would not be surprised if their legal worries are well-founded.
But on the other, in arguably trying to address the problems, the anti-Collabora side seems to exhibit a distressing lack of honor and decency. The dismissal of voting results that didn't go their way, the malicious misreadings of member votes against their proposals (eg, deciding "If the Board majority group insists on proceeding with this misguided and premature motion, I vote NO" was not a vote against the proposal because the motion was "neither misguided nor premature"), the arguments that complaints about their behavior violate community standards and are are not sufficiently respectful of the work they do, the toxic, patronizing, dismissive statements toward developers and others... even if they are right, I do not understand why they need to behave the way they are behaving.
The earlier threads from the Collabora side were also disappointing in how childish all of their arguments were structured. I read their posts and could barely understand what was being claimed in between all of the sarcasm and attacks, and I wasn't alone in the comments here.
From the outside, this entire situation is obviously very heated. What seems to be missing is some adults in the room who can turn down the tempers, get everyone to take a beat, and then start coming to some reasonable compromises.
Instead it feels like we're seeing the inevitable boiling over of passionate people who couldn't work well together and failed to find ways to cool off and work together.
It's a sad situation to watch.
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AFAICT from TFA the arrangement with Collabra was illegal. I think the frustration was that there is no vote to be had on how to proceed in a way that continues to be illegal. You can vote for a reform you can propose another actionable reform, or you can be thrown out.. And here we are?
I wish this was more clearly written. Maybe I missed something, and I guess this is supposing the reader already has a lot of background, but there are several points that confused me.
"At the time, nobody could imagine that the companies that had supported OpenOffice.org until then would create a project to kill LibreOffice."
Did they mean... to kill OpenOffice? Or had supported LibreOffice would want to create a project to kill it later? Because that fact that companies who had previously supported OpenOffice then switched to LibreOffice doesn't strike me as odd, given the situation with Oracle back then. Also, what is the "project" that is trying to kill LibreOffice?
I am not clear on how the Board of Directors differs from The Document Foundation (are they just the Board of Directors of The Document Foundation then?).
What is "TDC"? It is not even clear what that stands for, nor what this "parallel organization" was supposed to do and how it differed from The Document Foundation. And if "the plan to transfer many of TDF’s tasks and assets" to "TDC" didn't happen back in 2020, why is it being brought up here? But then the next paragraph talks about the transfer so it did happen the year before? But then was terminated? Again though, I don't get why it matters now except maybe that some people were upset by that move over five years ago.
"This attempt resulted in permanent damage to relations between the project’s components, and especially between certain BoD members and the team."
Who is "the team"? The Document Foundation?
"After years of discussions marked by accusations and finger-pointing, during which no real progress was made in resolving the legal issues, the authorities requested an audit..."
Who are "the authorities" requesting the audit?
A "third audit" was mentioned, but it is unclear if the one audit mentioned above in the post was that third one or one of the previous ones (describing these and when they happened would have helped).
I still have no clue as to what Collabora's relationship was and is to The Document Foundation.
They apologize for the need for this post, but I don't really understand why. I get the idea that, given their non-profit nature, there were issues, but making those more clear seems laudable (even if I don't think the post especially helped in doing so).
Agreed that this was written for an audience who already knows WTF is going on.
TDC is The Document Collective:
https://lwn.net/Articles/801016/
Agree wholeheartedly. Very confusing. If they want people to care, they need to explain the situation in a way to make people care.
IBM has created Apache OpenOffice to kill LibreOffice. The Document Foundation has a Board of Directors. The TDC project damaged the relations between companies and community. The Document Foundation has a team. The authorities are the German authorities overseeing not for profit foundations. The third audit in 2025 was after the first audit in 2023 and the second audit in 2024. Collabora is a LibreOffice ecosystem company. All of the above has been explained at lengths in the project's blog, chats and mailing lists.
Thank for the clarification, but it all should really be in that post if your goal is to try to persuade people of your argument (and "put an end to the speculation" about what happened), since people who don't know the background will have no clue where to find that info. At the very least links to those earlier posts are needed. And I say this as someone who uses LibreOffice daily both for work and my personal uses, someone who really hopes LibreOffice will succeed. Hopefully all this works out.
"explained at lengths" ... do we need to care to read all of that when someone "summarised" it for us in poorely written post? Also - correct me pls if I'm wrong – but I recall it was Oracle that gave OpenOffice to Apache foundation after its acquisition of Sun. If these people kill LibreOffice, someone at MS Office365 will cork a champagne ... What a cluster!
At the time, Oracle wanted to completely drop OpenOffice.org, but there was a contract with IBM which could use the source code to produce their proprietary Symphony office suite. Because of this contact, Oracle was not able to drop OOo and had to follow IBM's request to give the source code to ASF to create Apache OpenOffice. IBM openly declared the intention to kill LibreOffice during a call with The Document Foundation Steering Committee on April 30, 2011. I was in the call, and I regret I did not record the call.
Yes. I am bookmarking it for future reference. The post shows a perfect example why you need marketing and PR agency.
The situation is incredibly complex, and explaining it in full would need a book. The blog post is clear enough for the prople who have followed LibreOffice as a project, while other people have to do some research to understand all the details.
Just a copy editor would suffice.
As a person who refuses to use “free” cloud products, and won’t even consider Office on Windows, I’m a big fan of LibreOffice. I’ve donated a few times over the years but probably not enough.
I’ll be sad if there’s not a free & local “office” solution available.
That said, my eyes crossed trying to read this. Do I need to ask an LLM to read the various messages and tell me what’s going on? ;-)
I don't know about any of the drama happening, but if LibreOffice ceases to exist, there's still Softmaker FreeOffice as a free & local option. It's nothing fancy, but works for the times when I have to use one. I'm not against cloud products as you are, but it's nice being able to do stuff locally sometimes, it's just more convenient.
OnlyOffice and its upcoming Euro Office derivative, which I already like better than LibreOffice.
Apparently Euro-Office has some drama around it too: https://www.onlyoffice.com/blog/2026/03/onlyoffice-flags-lic...
OnlyOffice also seems to have a lack of clarity in regards to the ownership of the org (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47100599) but in general I think they're in the right here - you can't just ignore parts of a software license selectively because you feel like it. Oh and I liked their software when I did try it out, except LibreOffice seems like a slightly safer bet (though I'm also not as sensitive to the way its UI is).
I should also disclaim that I only need these office suites for occasional home use. If one of them disappears tomorrow it’s no big loss to me personally, not that I wouldn’t be sad about a loss of consumer choice.
If I need something for a business that I’m going to depend on I’m just gonna give Microsoft ten bucks a month, hate to say it. Office is really better than any of these options by a long shot. I also find the Google suite to be really good and free as in beer.
> I’m just gonna give Microsoft ten bucks a month, hate to say it.
After having used MS Office for a while, I have to admit that LibreOffice just feels more pleasant to me, when I don't need exact MS compatibility - the UI is customizable, Calc doesn't mess up CSV files when I open them, Writer also has most of the features you need and exporting PDF files is nice and has none of that OneDrive bullshit with them almost trying to hide your local file system as some secondary target.
That said, in some hardware configurations LibreOffice has slow and laggy rendering (you have to mess around with rendering settings, hardware acceleration and Skia and so on), some features like bibliography have broken on me in odd ways, and Impress can be a bit slow for larger presentations. OnlyOffice feels like it has more polish in regards to how approachable the UI/UX might be to a MS user, but feature wise isn't that far off.
I personally wouldn't reach for MS Office unless I wanted it as a part of their overall groupware - mail, Teams, AD and a bunch of other integrated stuff (though aside from AD, most other things feel a bit jank, like the new Outlook or Teams in general when compared to Slack).
If LO ceases to exist, then I will just use plain text typesetting tools.
There are many good options for text editing, some for presentations, but what about spreadsheets? Using Python/R/SQL everywhere ain't no panacea, spreadsheets are really useful in some cases and LO has the best implementation I've seen apart from Excel.
Gnumeric, since 2001
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnumeric
plenty of ways with sqlite. someone just needs to come up with a good front-end without monetizing it.
there's sqlite db browser, but not much challenger in this space because it either gets turned to a saas (notion, airtable) or is a niche dev tool.
If LibreOffice ceases to exist, won't the old installers still work? Is it forkable to a new project? I seem to remember that it was Star Office then Open Office then LibreOffice.
I think such situations are rather big risk that a community that already wasn't very active atrophies or splits and then atrophies. With code bases like that there's also a lot of maintenance so being able to run an old version is not necessarily enough.
What maintenance are you talking about? I'm quite sure I could open any document on my computer with a libreoffice version from ten years ago. The functionality doesn't magically rot away...
Security vulnerabilities for one obvious example
Yeah that ability to use old code is great as an emergency escape hatch but it's not really a viable day-to-day document editing strategy.
The questionnis: How does a community form, which can take a project tof that size? TDF andjvre Office cMd out of a long process of independent (from Sun Microsystems) contributions to OpenOffice, which at some point had a momentum to do a proper form and then another momentum to take over as the lead variant.
For a successful fork you need a notable amount of people engaging in the fork.
They will keep it for a while, but it is now named Collabora Office. That's where the development is happening.
Before Libre Office was Open Office.
I take comfort that we would not be without a local office suite for long.
I’d love for someone to be able to take it from “yeah it mostly works for me” to “oh fuck you Microsoft, I’m going to move our entire company over to this”.
I’m not going to hold my breath.
Boggles the mind that corporates stick to expensive, inefficient, insecure and in so many ways crap software. SQL Sever, Office, Oracle (any product), Windows servers and workstations - yet demand peak efficiency from staff.
because thats not about quality, its about "i demand something thats 100% exactly the same as microsofts product, even in the places where its objectively crappier. I also wish it to track the microslop so that it consistently stays as shitty as microslop deems, so that I may never realize I use something else."
This is the kind of attitude that stops OSS from becoming widely adopted. If simply shipping a quality office suite was enough, this problem would have been solved last millennium. (WordPerfect fuckin' slapped) And in fact, there are many quality office suites.
Organizations choose Office because it:
1. enables interoperability with other organizations
2. has a commercial throat to choke
3. has an existing pipeline of workers trained on it
4. has a deep feature set for edge-case power-users
5. integrates with other products and services that their customers want
Every institutional office-migration project runs into these issues -- they're solvable, but damn if OSS advocates stopped pretending they didn't exist, they might actually fix them. LibreOffice/TDF is the closest anyone has gotten thus far in this regard.
curious that item zero is missing.. for specific example, long ago.. Brazil was in the middle about modernizing using desktop computers, language translations, support, and a large dose of polarization about depending on American products. So many kinds of Office software were being tested, including of course the MSFT products. This story is from the late 90s.
One day, as much as I am aware, the entire national phone company of Brazil switched to using MSFT Office only, by decree from upper management. Why? much later, some correspondence between upper management / C-Suite at the company, and Brazilian attorneys hired by MSFT to negotiate, showed large, opaque payments, long-term discounts, and added support services, in exchange for changing to ONLY MSFT Office products. The change did in fact happen.
Use your own brain and understand that MSFT has able legal and business teams, hired in the target country, that have large incentives based on closing sales. Those sales are closed using negotiation language and incentives that are appealing to the C-Suite and their banking and legal partners, period.
I do not see this reality reflected in the too-neat summary of drivers there.
As if it is somehow MSFT's fault that others failed to do the same?
"Build it and they will come" is a falsehood proven over-and-over by a long history of dead startups who died before they ever figured out how find market fit. It doesn't matter how good your software is, if you don't convince people to use it, you won't have users.
Look at Red Hat, GitLab, etc for examples of how to make OSS successful.
> "so that I may never realize I use something else"
The main reasons are:
1) ... so my muscle memory work. (In some editor Ctrl+Y is redo, in others no, I never remember in which editors, I hate when it doesn't work.)
2) ... so I can exchange files with coworkers, and they will see exactly what I wrote (I recently received an email with a draft and I complained about a missing ≥. It actually was there was the visor in Gmail was not showing it.)
There is still Open Office: https://www.openoffice.org
Well, it exists but got one patch release (fixing 7 CVEs and little more) in 2025, no release in 2024, two patch releases in 2023. Not a really active project. Also most of the community moved on.
Apache OOo is dumped by Oracle and since then didn't receive much love.
That project exists only to leech users.
> I’ll be sad if there’s not a free & local “office” solution available.
I think a free open source suite will always exist. But probably slow down if existing open source solutions handicap progress for whatever the reason(s).
They should focus on making the office suite much more useful and powerful and wide-spread. Like ffmpg+mpv!
Meeks' blog post, for comparison:
https://www.collaboraonline.com/blog/tdf-ejects-its-core-dev...
Note the references to legal issues; draw your own conclusions.
> at the same time accusing others of historic conflicts of interest
Collabora clearly has a conflict of interest, as their Collabora Office products both benefit from, and compete with LibreOffice proper. They even allude to that conflict of interest in the next sentence:
> overriding past board and engineering steering committee decisions and violating their own processes to drag code out of the attic to enable competing with their largest single contributor
A non-profit dedicated to promoting open source software should do what is best for that project and its users regardless of if doing so steps on the toes of corporate sponsors.
"Collabora clearly has a conflict of interest, as their Collabora Office products both benefit from, and compete with LibreOffice proper."
But that was the point of TDF: being an umbrella for the community and the commercial partners. Commercial partner having its own interests is something that was expected and encouraged as long as the work would be done for the common good on the LibreOffice codebase. For the TDF itself there are COI policies in place as well from the very beginning.
"A non-profit dedicated to promoting open source software should do what is best for that project and its users regardless of if doing so steps on the toes of corporate sponsors."
That kind of thinking is what brought this result - especially when the corporate and the non-profit are supposed to be partners and work together for the common good. The result should be dialog to find a compromise that would work for both sides. So in this case forcefully reversing a previous decision and ignoring the de-atticisation rule (having active developers working on the code-base) was a needless aggressive move that just worsened the situation. And the reason for the move according to the TDF board was to "start the discussion".
Note that the proper procedure for de-atticisation of the LOOL codebase would be to confirm there is notable developer activity. Users wanting LOOL is NOT enough and the TDF board has clearly ignored one of its own rules.
This plausibly demonstrates why a nonprofit may not be a great vehicle for some free software projects - while the nonprofit should do whats best for the project, if the main work is done by commercial sponsors then it’s crucial those sponsors feel the relationship is beneficial.
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.
> if the main work is done by commercial sponsors then it’s crucial those sponsors feel the relationship is beneficial
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.
You're considering open source development as just another commercial endeavor. The fact that this is done by a nonprofit organization means it's pursuing goals that are not strictly commercial, and that is fine. Think about the GNU project as another example. If someone is not happy with that, it is always possible to start their own company.
I don’t think they’re considering it a commercial endeavor, they’re just acknowledging that complex open source projects often require paid work to effectively maintain and develop them.
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).
Do you consider GNU Emacs a small package?
I don't think they were talking about the size of the codebase. How much funding does emacs require to maintain?
If a text editor is not smaller than an office suite that handles Excel spreadsheets, PDFs, Word, PowerPoint, and Access databases, I made the right choice never using it.
I'm unclear on the relationship between Collabora and LibreOffice. Some of the earlier stories on this described TDF as ejecting LibreOffice core developers.
My understanding is that Collabora is an online collaborative office suit based on LibreOffice, with commercial support available and managed cloud hosting. It is also available fully open source and supports self-hosting if you don't want their commercial services. Their developers contribute back to LibreOffice.
What I think of when I think of core developers of an office suite are the people developing the word processor itself and the spreadsheet itself and the other core applications.
Did the ejected developers work on those, or did they only work on things built on top of then or other other non-core things? If they were working on the core applications how many non-Collabora people also work on them?
> Did the ejected developers work on those, or did they only work on things built on top of then or other other non-core things?
Yes, they worked on the core. According to Collabora's stats (from their perspective), they contribute more than half of the documented features from the release notes for LibreOffice 26.2 [1].
Collabora's own online version of LibreOffice lies in another repo [2], which presumably contains code specific to their own product built from LibreOffice. They seem to be moving toward a (maybe soft) fork of LibreOffice, while setting up their own Gerrit instance [3].
[1]: https://www.collaboraonline.com/blog/collabora-productivity-...
[2]: https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online
[3]: https://gerrit.collaboraoffice.com/plugins/gitiles/core/
For those of us with zero context, what's the story here?
Not sure myself, it seems like some of the founders were kicked out in 2025 for "misuse of funds" according to the auditor of TDF / or the Foundation authorities?
https://community.documentfoundation.org/t/well-known-high-c...
Also found this in the annual report, sounds quite serious:
> In 2023, following a request by the Foundation Authorities in Berlin, given the size our foundation has grown into over the last decade, TDF was audited, and a report was sent back to Berlin. The Board of Directors is working with the authorities to implement the improvements suggested by the audit
https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/fsqeJZrAtXeR7JD?d...
Would be helpful if the blog post was more clear about this
Yikes. They set up the foundation in Berlin, Germany? A country well known for its braindead tax laws and bureaucracy, particularly when it comes to NGOs?
There are plenty of non-profit software projects headquartered in Berlin, e.g. KDE since 1997, and they seem to do just fine.
Yeah because they went into existence way before the bureaucracy became a nightmare and have had ample time to evolve with the legal landscape.
It's stated as conflict of interest, not some bureaucracy.
Things are still vague, due to some legal liability, probably. Sounds to me like for some grants/tenders received by the non-profit were contracted out to Collabora. Which in turn, profits from the base project.
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.
Isn't this theft, if true?
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.
> 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
> 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).
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.
At the very least it looks very much like corrupt conduct, even if it isn’t.
No. They did the work. It is a corrupt practice, not theft
I'd go for the discussion on Meeks' post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47599305
It's poorly written, perhaps aimed at people already in the loop - would benefit from an AI edit.
Can someone enlighten me what's been going on in the open-source office application space lately? Here we have LibreOffice and Collabora parting ways; meanwhile NextCloud used to integrate OnlyOffice until v18, then started integrating Collabora in v19 (and also in the recently announced stack for openDesk and "Office EU") but then the other day NextCloud announced they'd fork OnlyOffice to create EuroOffice, … which clearly neither Collabora nor OnlyOffice seem to like?![0]
Please just tell me what the canonical stack is that I'm supposed to use these days. I still have scar tissue from the OwnCloud vs. NextCloud situation…
[0]: https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/02/eurooffice_forks_only...
Collabora is the blessed one currently, but you can use either, it supports either one, and you can easily swap them. The EuroOffice image will likely default to OnlyOffice, but NC has not announced any plans of switching that to the default. It could change in the future, but I don't foresee them discontinuing support for either if they have any say in it.
The EU is unleashing billions of euros to drop US controlled software this year and beyond. This means TDF, Collabora and NextCloud are tripping over themselves to scoop up the funds as non-American Office Software alternatives to Microsoft.
I run NextCloud (dockerised) at home so that I can easily share links with friends and that currently uses OnlyOffice (https://www.onlyoffice.com/). I self-host the OnlyOffice container with its own URL and setup NextCloud to link to that.
To be honest, I never use it, but just set it up as it seemed to be part of a decent NextCloud install.
I use and promote Libreoffice instead of cloud SaaS and M$ religiously and have been doing so for decades. While it does feel that 'peak office suite' is solidly in the rear-view mirror and the majority of tools are becoming ~irrelevant (nobody does physical meetings anymore, writer < LyX and spreadsheets are being supplanted by custom code with better visualization control and web integration), I still need Writer to deal with lawyers and their 'change tracking' and 'comments', and Calc for presenting 'give me money' financials to investors. Is there now a preferred fork we should follow?
Maybe within the strict confines of these cases made by Microsoft, which also have inherent monopoly designs behind them.
Office documents are still fundamentally opaque to data extraction and generation. The user interfaces of the components are still heavily restricted to dedicated applications as opposed to providing some sort of means of embedding them in other contexts such as gasp a web page that might have an actually good Excel interface.
And I would say in general llm should be a massive boon to closing the compatibility gap between free office applications and the barriers put up by proprietary ones, particularly format. Parsing and saving
If we can have an office document foundation similar to what Labor office does to provide generalized libraries and code for parsing office document formats saving them across many platforms, something that just piecemeal across most programming languages and environments, it could be a huge boon to open days formats represented by these relatively important file formats:
The spreadsheet
The word document
The presentation
The flowchart/chart
Well, Microsoft with things like OLE kind of pushed some of these capabilities across the Microsoft ecosystem. That sucks and it failed because it was within the Monopoly.
But the vision was a good one.
I used to have the impression that OpenOffice/LibreOffice had an outsized amount of drama surrounding it. I still do, but I used to, too.
I'm not following this, but having drama in an office suite dev team sounds funny to me. I just want to open an occasional word doc and sometimes make a spreadsheet.
A lot of open source software has drama so it isn't surprising to me.
Anything with more than a few humans will have drama. Most marriages have a lot and that is two people (who mostly manage anyway).
lack of drama is a bad sign - it means someone isn't allowed to think/feel. (This is okay in a few contexts but overall bad)
To be fair, closed source office suites also have drama. Did you know the VP who was responsible for the Office ribbon is in the Epstein files?
Damn, who would've thought the inventor of an interface so braindead only a child could like it was a predator
I didn't see direct evidence that he was a predator, but he and Epstein appear chummy and he sought career and legal advice from him. His girlfriend goes way back with him.
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This post seems yo raise speculation, not end it.
Is LibreOffice at risk?
LibreOffice development will continue and TDF will keep hiring new developers.
I have no idea what they are talking about. But is now clear that the TDF filed the lawsuit against Collabora, and then based on changed bylaws expelled the Collabora members. Suicidal tendencies.
Also, the future of LibreOffice is extremely bleak now. No further development, no maintainance, and losing the biggest contracts to a strong competitor, OnlyOffice.
Which is kinda unfortunate for us now. The TDF keeps the name, just as Sun did with OpenOffice. And Collabora has to find a new name. Which was already done 11 days ago: https://gerrit.collaboraoffice.com/plugins/gitiles/core/
But can they win back the EU contract for OnlyOffice?
> Ideally, we would have preferred to avoid this post. However, the articles and comments published in response to Collabora’s and Michael Meeks’ biased posts compel us to provide this background information on the events that led to the current situation.
> Unfortunately, we have to start from the very beginning, but we’ll try to keep it brief. The launch of the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation was handled with great enthusiasm by the founding group. They were driven by a noble goal, but also by a bit of healthy recklessness. After all, it was impossible to imagine what would happen after September 28, 2010, the date of the announcement.
Seems to be a common theme with open source projects that the maintainers think people care about them and their drama way more than they actually do. Sort of the same way that dealing with open source always ends up being a waste of time. This intro is a disaster; completely unclear, gives 0 context, assumes the user knows all the drama, and signals that what follows is going to be a long, drawn out and pointless mess.
Get. to. the. point.
I had the same impression. The introduction reads really unprofessionally.
I have no idea what this post is saying. Can someone post a quick summary. Is LibreOffice going away?
Heck I hope this doesn't result in a bug fork happening; it's already a PITA to deal with fixing bugs that have been inherited from OOo bug trackers or earlier. You hit things like wanting to test against a file that used to be in a long dead bug tracker.
I feel like this was written by somebody who thinks we've been in the room the whole time while things happened. It's so dense with allusions that nobody is going to be able to understand.
What is this even about?
- A licensing controversy with some cloud companies who used libre office's software?
- Some new tos thing?
- something else?
I guess we're just supposed to speculate about that, in contradiction of the title of the article.
Michael Meek’s referenced blog post. The irony is I remember him championing openness for OpenOffice and I remember how transparent he was when he helped found libreoffice and TDF. What a shame we have devolved to this situation.
https://www.collaboraonline.com/blog/tdf-ejects-its-core-dev...
Long live LibreOffice.
It seems there opens a new market as Europe plans to abandon Microsoft products. First OnlyOffice / EuroOffice and now this...
In terms of communication: The only clearly communicated message is that TDF is not fit for fulfilling its purpose and likely never have been. As an outsider I would suggest ceding the project and IP to a third party not involved in the historic squabbles and infighting. It would be a service to the community and enable the project flourish!
This entire fucking mess is a bunch of people writing open letters at each other that nobody outside of the closed system can parse at all. All of these stupid posts just make everyone involved look childish and incompetent. They seem to be comprehensible only if you're already too entrenched on one side to be swayed by anything, much less this horseshit.
Just to be clear, the source code exists and none of this matters to most of us. When these idiots get tired of fighting everyone will just be pillaging the corpse and moving forward as FOSS always does.
Can someone write a tl:dr; about what’s going on? I am a very satisfied user of LibreOffice, and some of the comments here, suggesting we will need an alternative, are troubling.
Not taking sides here. This communication could have been, far, far better handled had a crisis-PR person, or frankly any decent PR person, been involved.
I am confused.
What is the main issue now?
tl;dr the non-profit had acted outside the regulations for non-profits, to the benefit of some members and due to over eager action not actual dishonesty. Audits caught up with them, they have to change their ways.
I've really been enjoying the work that collabora (the consultancy) has done, especially around gaming on Linux.
So it's really disappointing to see Collabora Online and TDF behaving like this...
Are you thinking of Code Weavers?
No, Code Weavers do awesome work but I was thinking of the work that Valve has been funding around Mesa, the kernel, etc...
Considering that office suites are software from a bygone era, born from the idea of letting untrained secretarial staff use a PC as an advanced typewriter and calculator, the business and the squabbles surrounding them, which have absolutely nothing to do with FLOSS, are frankly laughable, if they weren't so pathetic.
LibreOffice (and any office suite) is a piece of software as massive as it is absurd, and those who use it don't even realise it, which is why there's so much business built around it. It's 2026; information shouldn't be managed in scattered files designed for printing and then used on screens anyway. It's high time people were taught how to actually use a computer, rather than playing around with software that hoped to make computers usable for those who don't know how to use them, and has done more harm than good in the process.
Too late for that. If you can't do it on a smart phone, it's not worth doing. And with AI, who needs a GUI?
If you like drink interested PRs dreams on sale yes, but reality is quite different.
The OEMs who have lied https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/der2024_en... through their teeth about the lifespan of a well-made desktop to compare it to a smartphone are simply on their last financial legs; their Nazi wet dream doesn't scale. A society like that doesn't work. That's why they'll collapse just like their German-speaking counterparts did a few years back.
The West is collapsing to save four kleptocrats and their model of exploiting us all; nature doesn't give a toss, it carries on her way and so does technology. Dead wood can stay standing for a long time, in some cases it even becomes a fossilised trunk, but it doesn't evolve; it's still a dead branch.
If you think the current Office model will be replaced by some LLM, you're dreaming just like those who hope for it and are working to make it happen. Sure, plenty of jobs are no longer necessary and gradually mankind, if we don't commit suicide first, will end up only creating new knowledge while machines apply it, but this model only works if it's open, distributed, and diverse enough to be resilient and evolve. The current monochrome model can only flare up and die.
Classic open source drama which makes the entire open source/FOSS ecosystem look like dog shit.
[dead]
Can someone with way more money than sense generate some AI video in a documentary style like The Office about this drama as comedy?
The Libre Office.
I have no idea what this drama is about, but it feels a lot like the kind of thing no one has time to even be interested in. OpenOffice and LibreOffice already feel irrelevant and dated to begin with. What’s the point of people paying attention to this battle if they’re not insiders? There are so many other options, although none truly open source I guess.
> OpenOffice and LibreOffice already feel irrelevant and dated to begin with.
It is the only non cloud free office solution which is truely free. How can this be irrelevant?
OnlyOffice? FreeOffice?
FreeOffice is proprietary software, not "truly free" in the FOSS way.
LibreOffice almost seemed irrelevant; with cheap to free (*included) tools in abundance, such as MS Office, Google Workspace, Apple Pages/Numbers/Keynote, the need for LibreOffice is not what it once was, back when StarOffice and OpenOffice were liberating people from the tyranny of Microsoft.
Now it's worse than irrelevant, it's a liability.
It's still the only free as in freedom office suite option I'm aware of. I do try my best to avoid needing such software at all (I prefer to stay inside vim), but it has its uses when dealing with files from other people, or niche stuff like importing XML and saving as a CSV.
For what it’s worth, AbiWord and Gnumeric are still around (but are of course much less capable).
Gnumeric is great. It's the only one that holds up with massive CSV files and remains snappy. So I tend to prefer it. Functions are more limited than Calc though.
About 10 years ago the Ubuntu package manager borked my installation of LibreOffice (or maybe it was OpenOffice then). I only used it for spreadsheets and Gnumeric was able to open the ODS files just fine. There was only one function that I need to change (DaysInYear for handling leap years).
If for any reason I have to go back to it, I think I can.
For context, you cannot export a Google Doc in its native format and import the file later from another account.
That’s the price you pay: Google owns your data. You’ve sold your soul to them.
None of the tools that you mentioned except for LibreOffice and OpenOffice are free-as-in-freedom, and if you’re using Linux on the desktop, then Microsoft Office and the Apple iWork suite are unavailable as desktop applications.
Some of us run unGoogled/M$ Linux systems and want offline functionality. None of those options you mentioned would work for us.
MS office has never been cheap or included
I guess you don’t remember a time when spreadsheets sold for $495 a seat. And that was just the spreadsheet. IIRC, Excel 1.0 retailed for $99.
One source[1] says the first release of Excel (for the Mac, in 1985) had a price of $395, or about $1,200 in inflation-adjusted 2026 dollars.
[1]: https://archive.org/details/history-of-PC
Forced +$30 per seat per month to get people loaded into their proprietary AI
It's $8.30/month. It's cheaper than Netflix and Amazon Prime.
Over 50 years' time that's $4980.
50 years ago you needed about 5 million bucks to get started with electronic spreadsheets on your IBM mainframe