Earlier quoted context omitted.
Before Libre Office was Open Office. I take comfort that we would not be without a local office suite for long.
There is still Open Office: https://www.openoffice.org
That project exists only to leech users.
LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation
111–120 of 139 posts
Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 com…
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’…
> if the main work is done by commercial sponsors then it’s crucial those sponsors feel the relationship is beneficial
But if the sponsor is getting a tax write-off because of their donation to non-profit to do work on the project that they would have done anyways for their commercial product, then they are basically just using the non-profit to avoid taxes, and while I'm not a lawyer, it wouldn't surprise me if that is illegal, especially if the company also controls seats on the board of directors.
> a nonprofit may not be a great vehicle for some free software projects
I've frequently wondered if we need some new kind of structure for funding open source projects works kind of like a non-profit but is more lenient in some ways, like allowing some kinds of business transactions in addition to accepting donations, and maybe you don't get as much of a tax deduction for donating to it. I don't know exactly what that would look like though, and it would probably be difficult to get right.
Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
If LO ceases to exist, then I will just use plain text typesetting tools.
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.
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.
Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yeah because they went into existence way before the bureaucracy became a nightmare and have had ample time to evolve with the legal landscape.
Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation
#115I 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 pr…
Yes. I am bookmarking it for future reference. The post shows a perfect example why you need marketing and PR agency.
Just a copy editor would suffice.
Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation
#116Can 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…
I run NextCloud (dockerised) at home so that I can easily share links with friends and that currently uses OnlyOffice (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.
Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation
#117I'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...
Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation
#118Considering 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…
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
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... 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.
Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation
#119Meeks' 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 com…
"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.
Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Do you consider GNU Emacs a small package?
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