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.
allenrb 1 hours 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? ;-)
fhdkweig 5 minutes ago [-]
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.
godot 59 minutes 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 7 minutes ago [-]
If LO ceases to exist, then I will just use plain text typesetting tools.
Note the references to legal issues; draw your own conclusions.
throwatdem12311 19 minutes 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.
chadash 1 hours ago [-]
For those of us with zero context, what's the story here?
eisa01 1 hours 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?
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
Would be helpful if the blog post was more clear about this
mschuster91 18 minutes 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?
WhyNotHugo 57 minutes ago [-]
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.
fallinditch 11 minutes ago [-]
It's poorly written, perhaps aimed at people already in the loop - would benefit from an AI edit.
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.
12_throw_away 59 minutes 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.
ma2kx 10 minutes ago [-]
It seems there opens a new market as Europe plans to abandon Microsoft products. First OnlyOffice / EuroOffice and now this...
jaggs 34 minutes ago [-]
Long live LibreOffice.
gentleman11 32 minutes 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?
1 hours ago [-]
contingencies 39 minutes 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 20 minutes 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.
SilverElfin 1 hours 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 51 minutes 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 25 minutes ago [-]
OnlyOffice? FreeOffice?
psim1 1 hours 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 1 hours 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 37 minutes ago [-]
For what it’s worth, AbiWord and Gnumeric are still around (but are of course much less capable).
megnu 26 minutes 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.
queenkjuul 1 hours ago [-]
MS office has never been cheap or included
bananamogul 27 minutes ago [-]
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.
downrightmike 32 minutes ago [-]
Forced +$30 per seat per month to get people loaded into their proprietary AI
add-sub-mul-div 26 minutes ago [-]
It's $8.30/month. It's cheaper than Netflix and Amazon Prime.
Rendered at 20:08:05 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
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? ;-)
https://www.collaboraonline.com/blog/tdf-ejects-its-core-dev...
Note the references to legal issues; draw your own conclusions.
The Libre Office.
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
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.
What is this even about?
- A licensing controversy with some cloud companies who used libre office's software?
- Some new tos thing?
- something else?
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.
It is the only non cloud free office solution which is truely free. How can this be irrelevant?
Now it's worse than irrelevant, it's a liability.