alt.hn

4/5/2026 at 6:23:14 PM

LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation

 https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/04/05/lets-put-an-end-to-the-speculation/

by eisa01

4/5/2026 at 7:52:17 PM

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.

by cge

4/5/2026 at 7:02:14 PM

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? ;-)

by allenrb

4/5/2026 at 8:03:30 PM

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.

by fhdkweig

4/5/2026 at 8:16:06 PM

Before Libre Office was Open Office.

I take comfort that we would not be without a local office suite for long.

by tomrod

4/5/2026 at 7:08:55 PM

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.

by godot

4/5/2026 at 8:00:40 PM

If LO ceases to exist, then I will just use plain text typesetting tools.

by deafpolygon

4/5/2026 at 8:11:23 PM

> I’ll be sad if there’s not a free & local “office” solution available.

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!

by shevy-java

4/5/2026 at 8:43:27 PM

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?

by tzs

4/5/2026 at 6:36:47 PM

Meeks' blog post, for comparison:

https://www.collaboraonline.com/blog/tdf-ejects-its-core-dev...

Note the references to legal issues; draw your own conclusions.

by everybodyknows

4/5/2026 at 8:19:44 PM

> 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 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.

by thayne

4/5/2026 at 6:46:51 PM

For those of us with zero context, what's the story here?

by chadash

4/5/2026 at 6:57:40 PM

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 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

by eisa01

4/5/2026 at 7:50:23 PM

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?

by mschuster91

4/5/2026 at 8:47:31 PM

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.

by mhitza

4/5/2026 at 8:13:58 PM

There are plenty of non-profit software projects headquartered in Berlin, e.g. KDE since 1997, and they seem to do just fine.

by janice1999

4/5/2026 at 7:11:01 PM

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.

by WhyNotHugo

4/5/2026 at 8:12:17 PM

Isn't this theft, if true?

by shevy-java

4/5/2026 at 7:57:29 PM

It's poorly written, perhaps aimed at people already in the loop - would benefit from an AI edit.

by fallinditch

4/5/2026 at 8:31:54 PM

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!

by nialse

4/5/2026 at 7:08:42 PM

I used to have the impression that OpenOffice/LibreOffice had an outsized amount of drama surrounding it. I still do, but I used to, too.

by 12_throw_away

4/5/2026 at 7:47:50 PM

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.

by asveikau

4/5/2026 at 7:57:41 PM

It seems there opens a new market as Europe plans to abandon Microsoft products. First OnlyOffice / EuroOffice and now this...

by ma2kx

4/5/2026 at 7:49:03 PM

Can someone with way more money than sense generate some AI video in a documentary style like The Office about this drama as comedy?

The Libre Office.

by throwatdem12311

4/5/2026 at 8:36:35 PM

Classic open source drama which makes the entire open source/FOSS ecosystem look like dog shit.

by avazhi

4/5/2026 at 7:34:27 PM

Long live LibreOffice.

by jaggs

4/5/2026 at 8:09:45 PM

I am confused.

What is the main issue now?

by shevy-java

4/5/2026 at 7:29:03 PM

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?

by contingencies

4/5/2026 at 7:47:43 PM

Maybe within the strict confines of these cases made by Microsoft, which also have inherent monopoly designs behind them.

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.

by AtlasBarfed

4/5/2026 at 7:03:17 PM

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.

by SilverElfin

4/5/2026 at 7:16:53 PM

> OpenOffice and LibreOffice already feel irrelevant and dated to begin with.

It is the only non cloud free office solution which is truely free. How can this be irrelevant?

by jhoechtl

4/5/2026 at 7:43:19 PM

OnlyOffice? FreeOffice?

by baal80spam

4/5/2026 at 8:43:49 PM

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.

by kkfx

4/5/2026 at 7:35:53 PM

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?

- Some new tos thing?

- something else?

by gentleman11

4/5/2026 at 8:40:33 PM

I guess we're just supposed to speculate about that, in contradiction of the title of the article.

by ssl-3

4/5/2026 at 8:26:02 PM

[dead]

by ValveFan6969

4/5/2026 at 6:54:59 PM

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.

by psim1

4/5/2026 at 7:05:29 PM

It's still the only free as in freedom office suite option I'm aware of. I do try my best to avoid needing such software at all (I prefer to stay inside vim), but it has its uses when dealing with files from other people, or niche stuff like importing XML and saving as a CSV.

by opan

4/5/2026 at 7:30:52 PM

For what it’s worth, AbiWord and Gnumeric are still around (but are of course much less capable).

by mananaysiempre

4/5/2026 at 8:14:28 PM

About 10 years ago the Ubuntu package manager borked my installation of LibreOffice (or maybe it was OpenOffice then). I only used it for spreadsheets and Gnumeric was able to open the ODS files just fine. There was only one function that I need to change (DaysInYear for handling leap years).

If for any reason I have to go back to it, I think I can.

by fhdkweig

4/5/2026 at 7:42:00 PM

Gnumeric is great. It's the only one that holds up with massive CSV files and remains snappy. So I tend to prefer it. Functions are more limited than Calc though.

by megnu

4/5/2026 at 7:04:20 PM

MS office has never been cheap or included

by queenkjuul

4/5/2026 at 7:40:53 PM

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.

by bananamogul

4/5/2026 at 7:36:12 PM

Forced +$30 per seat per month to get people loaded into their proprietary AI

by downrightmike

4/5/2026 at 7:42:05 PM

It's $8.30/month. It's cheaper than Netflix and Amazon Prime.

by add-sub-mul-div