But on the other, in arguably trying to address the problems, the anti-Collabora side seems to exhibit a distressing lack of honor and decency. The dismissal of voting results that didn't go their way, the malicious misreadings of member votes against their proposals (eg, deciding "If the Board majority group insists on proceeding with this misguided and premature motion, I vote NO" was not a vote against the proposal because the motion was "neither misguided nor premature"), the arguments that complaints about their behavior violate community standards and are are not sufficiently respectful of the work they do, the toxic, patronizing, dismissive statements toward developers and others... even if they are right, I do not understand why they need to behave the way they are behaving.
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 tempers, get everyone to take a beat, and then start coming to some reasonable compromises.
Instead it feels like we're seeing the inevitable boiling over of passionate people who couldn't work well together and failed to find ways to cool off and work together.
It's a sad situation to watch.
"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 project to kill it later? Because that fact that companies who had previously supported OpenOffice then switched to LibreOffice doesn't strike me as odd, given the situation with Oracle back then. Also, what is the "project" that is trying to kill LibreOffice?
I am not clear on how the Board of Directors differs from The Document Foundation (are they just the Board of Directors of The Document Foundation then?).
What is "TDC"? It is not even clear what that stands for, nor what this "parallel organization" was supposed to do and how it differed from The Document Foundation. And if "the plan to transfer many of TDF’s tasks and assets" to "TDC" didn't happen back in 2020, why is it being brought up here? But then the next paragraph talks about the transfer so it did happen the year before? But then was terminated? Again though, I don't get why it matters now except maybe that some people were upset by that move over five years ago.
"This attempt resulted in permanent damage to relations between the project’s components, and especially between certain BoD members and the team."
Who is "the team"? The Document Foundation?
"After years of discussions marked by accusations and finger-pointing, during which no real progress was made in resolving the legal issues, the authorities requested an audit..."
Who are "the authorities" requesting the audit?
A "third audit" was mentioned, but it is unclear if the one audit mentioned above in the post was that third one or one of the previous ones (describing these and when they happened would have helped).
I still have no clue as to what Collabora's relationship was and is to The Document Foundation.
They apologize for the need for this post, but I don't really understand why. I get the idea that, given their non-profit nature, there were issues, but making those more clear seems laudable (even if I don't think the post especially helped in doing so).
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? ;-)
For a successful fork you need a notable amount of people engaging in the fork.
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).
I take comfort that we would not be without a local office suite for long.
I’m not going to hold my breath.
Organizations choose Office because it:
1. enables interoperability with other organizations
2. has a commercial throat to choke
3. has an existing pipeline of workers trained on it
4. has a deep feature set for edge-case power-users
5. integrates with other products and services that their customers want
Every institutional office-migration project runs into these issues -- they're solvable, but damn if OSS advocates stopped pretending they didn't exist, they might actually fix them. LibreOffice/TDF is the closest anyone has gotten thus far in this regard.
One day, as much as I am aware, the entire national phone company of Brazil switched to using MSFT Office only, by decree from upper management. Why? much later, some correspondence between upper management / C-Suite at the company, and Brazilian attorneys hired by MSFT to negotiate, showed large, opaque payments, long-term discounts, and added support services, in exchange for changing to ONLY MSFT Office products. The change did in fact happen.
Use your own brain and understand that MSFT has able legal and business teams, hired in the target country, that have large incentives based on closing sales. Those sales are closed using negotiation language and incentives that are appealing to the C-Suite and their banking and legal partners, period.
I do not see this reality reflected in the too-neat summary of drivers there.
"Build it and they will come" is a falsehood proven over-and-over by a long history of dead startups who died before they ever figured out how find market fit. It doesn't matter how good your software is, if you don't convince people to use it, you won't have users.
Look at Red Hat, GitLab, etc for examples of how to make OSS successful.
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.)
Apache OOo is dumped by Oracle and since then didn't receive much love.
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!
https://www.collaboraonline.com/blog/tdf-ejects-its-core-dev...
Note the references to legal issues; draw your own conclusions.
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.
The reality is free software office apps require significant professional development input. Apache Open Office is the obvious example.
It’s a classic version of the tragedy of the commons. If Collabora goes off to its own thing, I struggle to believe they will maintain the development rate with new devs, and without development the TDF sponsorship will fall off.
I hope we are not looking back in two years time regretting this.
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).
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?
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/
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 decade, TDF was audited, and a report was sent back to Berlin. The Board of Directors is working with the authorities to implement the improvements suggested by the audit
https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/fsqeJZrAtXeR7JD?d...
Would be helpful if the blog post was more clear about this
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.
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.
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.
Those board members were elected by foundation members who also work for Collabora, so it was a privilege escalation from contributors to (controlling?) foundation board seats
As directors of LibreOffice, they should be looking for the best deals for LibreOffice. Contractors (or any employee) are always (logically and reasonably) looking to do the least amount of work possible for the most compensation possible, so if as a director you use yourself as a contractor, your duty opposes your interests.
And if on the one hand you're being paid a flat salary (or no salary at all) for making decisions for LibreOffice; and on the other hand the worse the contracts you make with yourself are for LibreOffice, the more income you will receive, plunder is absolutely inevitable.
This is exacerbated even more with some nonprofit who is answering to an amorphous public who is funding it. They have no way of stopping you, other than withdrawing entirely.
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...
https://www.collaboraonline.com/blog/tdf-ejects-its-core-dev...
lack of drama is a bad sign - it means someone isn't allowed to think/feel. (This is okay in a few contexts but overall bad)
Office documents are still fundamentally opaque to data extraction and generation. The user interfaces of the components are still heavily restricted to dedicated applications as opposed to providing some sort of means of embedding them in other contexts such as gasp a web page that might have an actually good Excel interface.
And I would say in general llm should be a massive boon to closing the compatibility gap between free office applications and the barriers put up by proprietary ones, particularly format. Parsing and saving
If we can have an office document foundation similar to what Labor office does to provide generalized libraries and code for parsing office document formats saving them across many platforms, something that just piecemeal across most programming languages and environments, it could be a huge boon to open days formats represented by these relatively important file formats:
The spreadsheet
The word document
The presentation
The flowchart/chart
Well, Microsoft with things like OLE kind of pushed some of these capabilities across the Microsoft ecosystem. That sucks and it failed because it was within the Monopoly.
But the vision was a good one.
What is this even about?
- A licensing controversy with some cloud companies who used libre office's software?
- Some new tos thing?
- something else?
> 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.
What is the main issue now?
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.
This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the endIt is the only non cloud free office solution which is truely free. How can this be irrelevant?
The Libre Office.
Now it's worse than irrelevant, it's a liability.
If for any reason I have to go back to it, I think I can.
That’s the price you pay: Google owns your data. You’ve sold your soul to them.