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.
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 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.
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?
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
It's poorly written, perhaps aimed at people already in the loop - would benefit from an AI edit.
I'd go for the discussion on Meeks' post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47599305
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 used to have the impression that OpenOffice/LibreOffice had an outsized amount of drama surrounding it. I still do, but I used to, too.
It seems there opens a new market as Europe plans to abandon Microsoft products. First OnlyOffice / EuroOffice and now this...
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 am confused.
What is the main issue now?
Long live LibreOffice.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.