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.
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 have no idea what this drama is about, but it feels a lot like the kind of thing no one has time to even be interested in. OpenOffice and LibreOffice already feel irrelevant and dated to begin with. What’s the point of people paying attention to this battle if they’re not insiders? There are so many other options, although none truly open source I guess.
I use and promote Libreoffice instead of cloud SaaS and M$ religiously and have been doing so for decades. While it does feel that 'peak office suite' is solidly in the rear-view mirror and the majority of tools are becoming ~irrelevant (nobody does physical meetings anymore, writer < LyX and spreadsheets are being supplanted by custom code with better visualization control and web integration), I still need Writer to deal with lawyers and their 'change tracking' and 'comments', and Calc for presenting 'give me money' financials to investors. Is there now a preferred fork we should follow?
I 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?
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.
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 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.
AFAICT from TFA the arrangement with Collabra was illegal. I think the frustration was that there is no vote to be had on how to proceed in a way that
continues to be illegal. You can vote for a reform you can propose another actionable reform, or you can be thrown out.. And here we are?
In 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!
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 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?
Considering 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.
> 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.
Just to be clear, the source code exists and none of this matters to most of us. When these idiots get tired of fighting everyone will just be pillaging the corpse and moving forward as FOSS always does.
I 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 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).
IBM has created Apache OpenOffice to kill LibreOffice. The Document Foundation has a Board of Directors. The TDC project damaged the relations between companies and community. The Document Foundation has a team. The authorities are the German authorities overseeing not for profit foundations. The third audit in 2025 was after the first audit in 2023 and the second audit in 2024. Collabora is a LibreOffice ecosystem company. All of the above has been explained at lengths in the project's blog, chats and mailing lists.
"explained at lengths" ... do we need to care to read all of that when someone "summarised" it for us in poorely written post?
Also - correct me pls if I'm wrong – but I recall it was Oracle that gave OpenOffice to Apache foundation after its acquisition of Sun.
If these people kill LibreOffice, someone at MS Office365 will cork a champagne ... What a cluster!
At the time, Oracle wanted to completely drop OpenOffice.org, but there was a contract with IBM which could use the source code to produce their proprietary Symphony office suite. Because of this contact, Oracle was not able to drop OOo and had to follow IBM's request to give the source code to ASF to create Apache OpenOffice. IBM openly declared the intention to kill LibreOffice during a call with The Document Foundation Steering Committee on April 30, 2011. I was in the call, and I regret I did not record the call.
Thank for the clarification, but it all should really be in that post if your goal is to try to persuade people of your argument (and "put an end to the speculation" about what happened), since people who don't know the background will have no clue where to find that info. At the very least links to those earlier posts are needed. And I say this as someone who uses LibreOffice daily both for work and my personal uses, someone who really hopes LibreOffice will succeed. Hopefully all this works out.
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…
The EU is unleashing billions of euros to drop US controlled software this year and beyond. This means TDF, Collabora and NextCloud are tripping over themselves to scoop up the funds as non-American Office Software alternatives to Microsoft.
41 comments
[ 275 ms ] story [ 1839 ms ] threadhttps://www.collaboraonline.com/blog/tdf-ejects-its-core-dev...
Note the references to legal issues; draw your own conclusions.
Now it's worse than irrelevant, it's a liability.
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? ;-)
What is this even about?
- A licensing controversy with some cloud companies who used libre office's software?
- Some new tos thing?
- something else?
The Libre Office.
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.
What is the main issue now?
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?
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.
> 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.
"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).
Is LibreOffice at risk?
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...