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.
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? ;-)
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’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”.
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."
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.
> 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.
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.
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].
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).
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
> 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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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? ;-)
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.
Before Libre Office was Open Office.
I take comfort that we would not be without a local office suite for long.
There is still Open Office: https://www.openoffice.org
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.
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."
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.
If LO ceases to exist, then I will just use plain text typesetting tools.
> 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.
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.
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/
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).
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.
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.
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.
This post seems yo raise speculation, not end it.
Is LibreOffice at risk?
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)
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.
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!
It seems there opens a new market as Europe plans to abandon Microsoft products. First OnlyOffice / EuroOffice and now this...
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.
Long live LibreOffice.
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.
> 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 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 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.
Classic open source drama which makes the entire open source/FOSS ecosystem look like dog shit.
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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
It's $8.30/month. It's cheaper than Netflix and Amazon Prime.
Over 50 years' time that's $4980.
Forced +$30 per seat per month to get people loaded into their proprietary AI