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LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation

blog.documentfoundation.org

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

#51

Post by blm126 »

shevy-java wrote: post #36
WhyNotHugo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I wouldn't call it theft, exactly. Presumably work did get done. If I'm reading it right, its just a terrible conflict of interest. The board uses donations to pay companies to work on LibreOffice. That seems totally fine. Some of the board were running/part of companies that rely and work on LibreOffice. That also seems mostly fine? You want your board to represent your community. Then, those same board members directed work towards their companies.

That's definitely a conflict of interest, but I wouldn't call it theft unless you prove the foundation was getting a bad deal. Could the foundation have gotten the work done better or cheaper hiring non-represented companies? That's the question you have to answer to call this theft.

It doesn't seem that is really what the foundation is arguing though, so I'm guessing it wasn't that bad. It seems more their argument is that this violates the non-profit laws they operate under.

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

#52

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

tomrod wrote: post #39
allenrb wrote: post #8

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? ;-)

Before Libre Office was Open Office. I take comfort that we would not be without a local office suite for long.

I’d love for someone to be able to take it from “yeah it mostly works for me” to “oh fuck you Microsoft, I’m going to move our entire company over to this”.

I’m not going to hold my breath.

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

#53

Post by worik »

shevy-java wrote: post #36
WhyNotHugo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No. They did the work. It is a corrupt practice, not theft

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

#54

Post by worik »

shevy-java wrote: post #34

I am confused. What is the main issue now?

tl;dr the non-profit had acted outside the regulations for non-profits, to the benefit of some members and due to over eager action not actual dishonesty. Audits caught up with them, they have to change their ways.

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

#55

Post by MrDresden »

psim1 wrote: 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.

Some of us run unGoogled/M$ Linux systems and want offline functionality. None of those options you mentioned would work for us.

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

#56

Post by bigfatkitten »

shevy-java wrote: post #36
WhyNotHugo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

At the very least it looks very much like corrupt conduct, even if it isn’t.

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

#57

Post by charcircuit »

asveikau wrote: post #26

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.

A lot of open source software has drama so it isn't surprising to me.

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

#58

Post by StrauXX »

Invictus0 wrote: post #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 ha…

I had the same impression. The introduction reads really unprofessionally.

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

#60

Post by maxloh »

tzs wrote: post #46

I'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 servi…

> 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?

Yes, they worked on the core. According to Collabora's stats (from their perspective), they contribute more than half of the documented features from the release notes for LibreOffice 26.2 [1].

Collabora's own online version of LibreOffice lies in another repo [2], which presumably contains code specific to their own product built from LibreOffice. They seem to be moving toward a (maybe soft) fork of LibreOffice, while setting up their own Gerrit instance [3].

[1]: https://www.collaboraonline.com/blog/collabora-productivity-...

[2]: https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online

[3]: https://gerrit.collaboraoffice.com/plugins/gitiles/core/

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