LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation

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? ;-)

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?

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.

For those of us with zero context, what's the story here?

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 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.

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.

Classic open source drama which makes the entire open source/FOSS ecosystem look like dog shit.

Long live LibreOffice.

I am confused.

What is the main issue now?

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?

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.

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?

[dead]

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.