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LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation

blog.documentfoundation.org

21–30 of 139 posts

Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation

#21
post #6

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.

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.

Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation

#22
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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.

Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation

#23
post #6

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.

MS office has never been cheap or included

It's $8.30/month. It's cheaper than Netflix and Amazon Prime.

Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation

#24

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?

Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation

#25

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 Writer to deal with lawyers and their 'change tracking' and 'comments', and Calc for presenting 'give me money' financials to investors.…

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.

Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation

#28
post #7
post #3

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 de…

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?

Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation

#29
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.

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