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LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation
41–50 of 139 posts
Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation
#42In 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!
Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation
#43Classic open source drama which makes the entire open source/FOSS ecosystem look like dog shit.
Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation
#44For those of us with zero context, what's the story here?
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Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation
#45I 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?
I guess we're just supposed to speculate about that, in contradiction of the title of the article.
Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation
#46I'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?
Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation
#47Considering 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.
Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation
#48Earlier 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?
It's stated as conflict of interest, not some bureaucracy.
Things are still vague, due to some legal liability, probably. Sounds to me like for some grants/tenders received by the non-profit were contracted out to Collabora. Which in turn, profits from the base project.
Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
One source[1] says the first release of Excel (for the Mac, in 1985) had a price of $395, or about $1,200 in inflation-adjusted 2026 dollars.
Re: LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation
#50> 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.