Discussion
psim1: 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.
chadash: For those of us with zero context, what's the story here?
replooda: I'd go for the discussion on Meeks' post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47599305
Dwedit: Mmmmmm... freezing of tenders.
WhyNotHugo: 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.
jaggs: Long live LibreOffice.
opan: 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.
mananaysiempre: For what it’s worth, AbiWord and Gnumeric still exist (but are of course much less capable).
contingencies: 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?
SilverElfin: 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.
jhoechtl: > 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?
baal80spam: OnlyOffice? FreeOffice?
queenkjuul: MS office has never been cheap or included
add-sub-mul-div: It's $8.30/month. It's cheaper than Netflix and Amazon Prime.
megnu: 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.
bananamogul: 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.
cge: 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.
eisa01: 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 audithttps://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/fsqeJZrAtXeR7JD?d...Would be helpful if the blog post was more clear about this
mschuster91: 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?
allenrb: 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? ;-)
fhdkweig: 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.
godot: 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.
deafpolygon: If LO ceases to exist, then I will just use plain text typesetting tools.
tomrod: Before Libre Office was Open Office.I take comfort that we would not be without a local office suite for long.
fhdkweig: 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.
janice1999: There are plenty of non-profit software projects headquartered in Berlin, e.g. KDE since 1997, and they seem to do just fine.
