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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

#71

Post by kackerlacker »

fhdkweig wrote: post #33
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? ;-)

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.

I think such situations are rather big risk that a community that already wasn't very active atrophies or splits and then atrophies. With code bases like that there's also a lot of maintenance so being able to run an old version is not necessarily enough.

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

#72

Post by coliveira »

ealexhudson wrote: post #65
thayne wrote: post #40

Earlier 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’…

You're considering open source development as just another commercial endeavor. The fact that this is done by a nonprofit organization means it's pursuing goals that are not strictly commercial, and that is fine. Think about the GNU project as another example. If someone is not happy with that, it is always possible to start their own company.

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

#74

Post by codethief »

Can 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 clearly neither Collabora nor OnlyOffice seem to like?![0]

Please just tell me what the canonical stack is that I'm supposed to use these days. I still have scar tissue from the OwnCloud vs. NextCloud situation…

[0]: https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/02/eurooffice_forks_only...

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

#75

Post by gus_massa »

redeeman wrote: post #62
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

because thats not about quality, its about "i demand something thats 100% exactly the same as microsofts product, even in the places where its objectively crappier. I also wish it to track the microslop so that it consistently stays as shitty as microslop deems, so that I may never realize I use something else."

> "so that I may never realize I use something else"

The main reasons are:

1) ... so my muscle memory work. (In some editor Ctrl+Y is redo, in others no, I never remember in which editors, I hate when it doesn't work.)

2) ... so I can exchange files with coworkers, and they will see exactly what I wrote (I recently received an email with a draft and I complained about a missing ≥. It actually was there was the visor in Gmail was not showing it.)

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

#76

Post by dangus »

godot wrote: post #13
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? ;-)

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.

OnlyOffice and its upcoming Euro Office derivative, which I already like better than LibreOffice.

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

#77

Post by dangus »

coliveira wrote: post #72
ealexhudson wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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’…

You're considering open source development as just another commercial endeavor. The fact that this is done by a nonprofit organization means it's pursuing goals that are not strictly commercial, and that is fine. Think about the GNU project as another example. If someone is not happy with that, it is always possible to start their own company.

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 dollar industry of complex office applications and services.

It’s also an open source project that has pretty much always depended on corporate sponsorship and a paid variant rather than having some other form financial backing (e.g., it never went the Wikipedia route of being completely free for everyone and only surviving on donations).

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

#78

Post by cindyllm »

Aurornis wrote: post #69
cge wrote: post #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 dec…

The earlier threads from the Collabora side were also disappointing in how childish all of their arguments were structured. I read their posts and could barely understand what was being claimed in between all of the sarcasm and attacks, and I wasn't alone in the comments here. From the outside, this entire situation is obviously very heated. What seems to be missing is some adults in the room who can turn down the te…

[dead]

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

#79

Post by hackze »

dangus wrote: post #77
coliveira wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're considering open source development as just another commercial endeavor. The fact that this is done by a nonprofit organization means it's pursuing goals that are not strictly commercial, and that is fine. Think about the GNU project as another example. If someone is not happy with that, it is always possible to start their own company.

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?

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

#80

Post by KronisLV »

dangus wrote: post #76
godot wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OnlyOffice and its upcoming Euro Office derivative, which I already like better than LibreOffice.

Apparently Euro-Office has some drama around it too: https://www.onlyoffice.com/blog/2026/03/onlyoffice-flags-lic...

OnlyOffice also seems to have a lack of clarity in regards to the ownership of the org (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47100599) but in general I think they're in the right here - you can't just ignore parts of a software license selectively because you feel like it. Oh and I liked their software when I did try it out, except LibreOffice seems like a slightly safer bet (though I'm also not as sensitive to the way its UI is).

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