8 ms·

LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation

203 points by eisa01 6mo ago

ma2kx 6mo ago
It seems there opens a new market as Europe plans to abandon Microsoft products. First OnlyOffice / EuroOffice and now this...
everybodyknows 6mo ago
Meeks' blog post, for comparison: https://www.collaboraonline.com/blog/tdf-ejects-its-core-developers/ https://www.collaboraonline.com/blog/tdf-ejects-its-core-dev... Note the references to legal issues; draw your own conclusions.
- thayne 6mo ago
  > 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.
  - ealexhudson 6mo ago
    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.
    - coliveira 6mo ago
      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.
      - dangus 6mo ago
        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).
        hackze 6mo ago
        Do you consider GNU Emacs a small package?
        Seattle3503 6mo ago
        I don't think they were talking about the size of the codebase. How much funding does emacs require to maintain?
        deleted 6mo ago
        [deleted]
        dangus 6mo ago
        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.
  - quikee 6mo ago
    "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.
chadash 6mo ago
For those of us with zero context, what's the story here?
- replooda 6mo ago
  I'd go for the discussion on Meeks' post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47599305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47599305
- eisa01 6mo ago
  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-contributors-were-removed/12618/20 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?dir=/&editing=false&openfile=true https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/fsqeJZrAtXeR7JD?d... Would be helpful if the blog post was more clear about this
  - mschuster91 6mo ago
    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?
    - janice1999 6mo ago
      There are plenty of non-profit software projects headquartered in Berlin, e.g. KDE since 1997, and they seem to do just fine.
      - mschuster91 6mo ago
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
psim1 6mo ago
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.
- opan 6mo ago
  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.
  - mananaysiempre 6mo ago
    For what it’s worth, AbiWord and Gnumeric are still around (but are of course much less capable).
    - megnu 6mo ago
      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.
    - fhdkweig 6mo ago
      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.
- queenkjuul 6mo ago
  MS office has never been cheap or included
allenrb 6mo ago
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? ;-)
- godot 6mo ago
  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.
  - deafpolygon 6mo ago
    If LO ceases to exist, then I will just use plain text typesetting tools.
    - c7b 6mo ago
      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.
      - heresie-dabord 6mo ago
        Gnumeric, since 2001 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnumeric https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnumeric
      - deafpolygon 6mo ago
        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.
SilverElfin 6mo ago
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.
- jhoechtl 6mo ago
  > 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?
  - baal80spam 6mo ago
    OnlyOffice? FreeOffice?
    - maxloh 6mo ago
      FreeOffice is proprietary software, not "truly free" in the FOSS way.
12_throw_away 6mo ago
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.
contingencies 6mo ago
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?
- AtlasBarfed 6mo ago
  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.
jaggs 6mo ago
Long live LibreOffice.
gentleman11 6mo ago
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?
- ssl-3 6mo ago
  I guess we're just supposed to speculate about that, in contradiction of the title of the article.
asveikau 6mo ago
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.
- charcircuit 6mo ago
  A lot of open source software has drama so it isn't surprising to me.
  - bluGill 6mo ago
    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)
    - deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
  - asveikau 6mo ago
    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?
    - mghackerlady 6mo ago
      Damn, who would've thought the inventor of an interface so braindead only a child could like it was a predator
      - asveikau 6mo ago
        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.
- 6mo ago
throwatdem12311 6mo ago
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.
cge 6mo ago
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.
- Aurornis 6mo ago
  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.
  - cindyllm 6mo ago
    [dead]
- kackerlacker 6mo ago
  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?
shevy-java 6mo ago
I am confused. What is the main issue now?
- worik 6mo ago
  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.
ValveFan6969 6mo ago
[dead]
nialse 6mo ago
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!
avazhi 6mo ago
Classic open source drama which makes the entire open source/FOSS ecosystem look like dog shit.
tzs 6mo ago
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?
- maxloh 6mo ago
  > 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-contributions-in-libreoffice-26-2/ https://www.collaboraonline.com/blog/collabora-productivity-... [2]: https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online [3]: https://gerrit.collaboraoffice.com/plugins/gitiles/core/ https://gerrit.collaboraoffice.com/plugins/gitiles/core/
kkfx 6mo ago
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.
- BobBagwill 6mo ago
  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? This is the end Beautiful friend This is the end My only friend, the end
  - kkfx 6mo ago
    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.pdf 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.
Invictus0 6mo ago
> 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.
- StrauXX 6mo ago
  I had the same impression. The introduction reads really unprofessionally.
ddtaylor 6mo ago
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.
garciansmith 6mo ago
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).
- nosioptar 6mo ago
  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/ https://lwn.net/Articles/801016/
- 6mo ago
_spduchamp 6mo ago
This post seems yo raise speculation, not end it. Is LibreOffice at risk?
- buovjaga 6mo ago
  LibreOffice development will continue and TDF will keep hiring new developers.
codethief 6mo ago
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_onlyoffice/ https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/02/eurooffice_forks_only...
- ndsipa_pomu 6mo ago
  I run NextCloud (dockerised) at home so that I can easily share links with friends and that currently uses OnlyOffice (https://www.onlyoffice.com/ 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.
- Moomoomoo309 6mo ago
  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.
- delfinom 6mo ago
  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.
geophile 6mo ago
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.
starkparker 6mo ago
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.
everdrive 6mo ago
I have no idea what this post is saying. Can someone post a quick summary. Is LibreOffice going away?
SEJeff 6mo ago
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-developers/ https://www.collaboraonline.com/blog/tdf-ejects-its-core-dev...
neoCrimeLabs 6mo ago
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.
trebligdivad 6mo ago
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.
tym0 6mo ago
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...
- LeFantome 6mo ago
  Are you thinking of Code Weavers?
  - tym0 6mo ago
    No, Code Weavers do awesome work but I was thinking of the work that Valve has been funding around Mesa, the kernel, etc...
rurban 6mo ago
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/ https://gerrit.collaboraoffice.com/plugins/gitiles/core/ But can they win back the EU contract for OnlyOffice?
cachius 6mo ago
Precursor https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47599305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47599305 2026-04-01 sadly no April fools This post is from 2026-04-05 Follow-up https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47718764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47718764 2026-04-06

203 points by eisa01 6mo ago

ma2kx 6mo ago

It seems there opens a new market as Europe plans to abandon Microsoft products. First OnlyOffice / EuroOffice and now this...

everybodyknows 6mo ago

Meeks' blog post, for comparison: https://www.collaboraonline.com/blog/tdf-ejects-its-core-developers/ https://www.collaboraonline.com/blog/tdf-ejects-its-core-dev... Note the references to legal issues; draw your own conclusions.

thayne 6mo ago
> 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.
- ealexhudson 6mo ago
  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.
  - coliveira 6mo ago
    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.
    - dangus 6mo ago
      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).
      - hackze 6mo ago
        Do you consider GNU Emacs a small package?
        Seattle3503 6mo ago
        I don't think they were talking about the size of the codebase. How much funding does emacs require to maintain?
        deleted 6mo ago
        [deleted]
        dangus 6mo ago
        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.
- quikee 6mo ago
  "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.

chadash 6mo ago

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

replooda 6mo ago
I'd go for the discussion on Meeks' post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47599305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47599305
eisa01 6mo ago
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-contributors-were-removed/12618/20 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?dir=/&editing=false&openfile=true https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/fsqeJZrAtXeR7JD?d... Would be helpful if the blog post was more clear about this
- mschuster91 6mo ago
  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?
  - janice1999 6mo ago
    There are plenty of non-profit software projects headquartered in Berlin, e.g. KDE since 1997, and they seem to do just fine.
    - mschuster91 6mo ago

deleted 6mo ago

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psim1 6mo ago

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.

opan 6mo ago
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.
- mananaysiempre 6mo ago
  For what it’s worth, AbiWord and Gnumeric are still around (but are of course much less capable).
  - megnu 6mo ago
    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.
  - fhdkweig 6mo ago
    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.
queenkjuul 6mo ago
MS office has never been cheap or included

allenrb 6mo ago

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? ;-)

godot 6mo ago
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.
- deafpolygon 6mo ago
  If LO ceases to exist, then I will just use plain text typesetting tools.
  - c7b 6mo ago
    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.
    - heresie-dabord 6mo ago
      Gnumeric, since 2001 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnumeric https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnumeric
    - deafpolygon 6mo ago
      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.

SilverElfin 6mo ago

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.

jhoechtl 6mo ago
> 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?
- baal80spam 6mo ago
  OnlyOffice? FreeOffice?
  - maxloh 6mo ago
    FreeOffice is proprietary software, not "truly free" in the FOSS way.

12_throw_away 6mo ago

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.

contingencies 6mo ago

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?

AtlasBarfed 6mo ago
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.

jaggs 6mo ago

Long live LibreOffice.

gentleman11 6mo ago

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?

ssl-3 6mo ago
I guess we're just supposed to speculate about that, in contradiction of the title of the article.

asveikau 6mo ago

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.

charcircuit 6mo ago
A lot of open source software has drama so it isn't surprising to me.
- bluGill 6mo ago
  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)
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
- asveikau 6mo ago
  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?
  - mghackerlady 6mo ago
    Damn, who would've thought the inventor of an interface so braindead only a child could like it was a predator
    - asveikau 6mo ago
      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.
6mo ago

throwatdem12311 6mo ago

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.

cge 6mo ago

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.

Aurornis 6mo ago
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.
- cindyllm 6mo ago
  [dead]
kackerlacker 6mo ago
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?

shevy-java 6mo ago

I am confused. What is the main issue now?

worik 6mo ago
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.

ValveFan6969 6mo ago

[dead]

nialse 6mo ago

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!

avazhi 6mo ago

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

tzs 6mo ago

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?

maxloh 6mo ago
> 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-contributions-in-libreoffice-26-2/ https://www.collaboraonline.com/blog/collabora-productivity-... [2]: https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online [3]: https://gerrit.collaboraoffice.com/plugins/gitiles/core/ https://gerrit.collaboraoffice.com/plugins/gitiles/core/

kkfx 6mo ago

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.

BobBagwill 6mo ago
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? This is the end Beautiful friend This is the end My only friend, the end
- kkfx 6mo ago
  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.pdf 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.

Invictus0 6mo ago

> 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.

StrauXX 6mo ago
I had the same impression. The introduction reads really unprofessionally.

ddtaylor 6mo ago

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.

garciansmith 6mo ago

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).

nosioptar 6mo ago
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/ https://lwn.net/Articles/801016/
6mo ago

_spduchamp 6mo ago

This post seems yo raise speculation, not end it. Is LibreOffice at risk?

buovjaga 6mo ago
LibreOffice development will continue and TDF will keep hiring new developers.

codethief 6mo ago

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_onlyoffice/ https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/02/eurooffice_forks_only...

ndsipa_pomu 6mo ago
I run NextCloud (dockerised) at home so that I can easily share links with friends and that currently uses OnlyOffice (https://www.onlyoffice.com/ 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.
Moomoomoo309 6mo ago
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.
delfinom 6mo ago
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.

geophile 6mo ago

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.

starkparker 6mo ago

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.

everdrive 6mo ago

I have no idea what this post is saying. Can someone post a quick summary. Is LibreOffice going away?

SEJeff 6mo ago

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-developers/ https://www.collaboraonline.com/blog/tdf-ejects-its-core-dev...

neoCrimeLabs 6mo ago

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.

trebligdivad 6mo ago

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.

tym0 6mo ago

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...

LeFantome 6mo ago
Are you thinking of Code Weavers?
- tym0 6mo ago
  No, Code Weavers do awesome work but I was thinking of the work that Valve has been funding around Mesa, the kernel, etc...

rurban 6mo ago

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/ https://gerrit.collaboraoffice.com/plugins/gitiles/core/ But can they win back the EU contract for OnlyOffice?

cachius 6mo ago

Precursor https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47599305 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47599305 2026-04-01 sadly no April fools This post is from 2026-04-05 Follow-up https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47718764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47718764 2026-04-06