It seems there opens a new market as Europe plans to abandon Microsoft products. First OnlyOffice / EuroOffice and now this...
LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation
31–40 of 139 posts
Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation
#32As 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 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.
Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation
#33As 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.
Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation
#34I am confused.
What is the main issue now?
Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation
#35As 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’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!
Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation
#36For those of us with zero context, what's the story here?
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?
Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
There are plenty of non-profit software projects headquartered in Berlin, e.g. KDE since 1997, and they seem to do just fine.
Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation
#38Earlier 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).
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.
Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation
#39As 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? ;-)
Before Libre Office was Open Office.
I take comfort that we would not be without a local office suite for long.
Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation
#40Meeks' 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.