[HN Gopher] LibreOffice - Let's put an end to the speculation
___________________________________________________________________
LibreOffice - Let's put an end to the speculation
Author : eisa01
Score : 140 points
Date : 2026-04-05 18:23 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.documentfoundation.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.documentfoundation.org)
| everybodyknows wrote:
| 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.
| thayne wrote:
| > 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.
| ealexhudson wrote:
| 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'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.
| coliveira wrote:
| 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.
| dangus wrote:
| 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).
| hackze wrote:
| Do you consider GNU Emacs a small package?
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| I don't think they were talking about the size of the
| codebase. How much funding does emacs require to
| maintain?
| chadash wrote:
| For those of us with zero context, what's the story here?
| replooda wrote:
| I'd go for the discussion on Meeks' post:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47599305
| eisa01 wrote:
| 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
| mschuster91 wrote:
| 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?
| janice1999 wrote:
| There are plenty of non-profit software projects
| headquartered in Berlin, e.g. KDE since 1997, and they seem
| to do just fine.
| mhitza wrote:
| 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.
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| 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.
| shevy-java wrote:
| Isn't this theft, if true?
| blm126 wrote:
| I wouldn't call it theft, exactly. Presumably work did get
| done. If I'm reading it right, its just a terrible conflict
| of interest. The board uses donations to pay companies to
| work on LibreOffice. That seems totally fine. Some of the
| board were running/part of companies that rely and work on
| LibreOffice. That also seems mostly fine? You want your
| board to represent your community. Then, those same board
| members directed work towards their companies.
|
| 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.
| worik wrote:
| No. They did the work. It is a corrupt practice, not theft
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| At the very least it looks very much like corrupt conduct,
| even if it isn't.
| fallinditch wrote:
| It's poorly written, perhaps aimed at people already in the
| loop - would benefit from an AI edit.
| psim1 wrote:
| 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.
| queenkjuul wrote:
| MS office has never been cheap or included
| downrightmike wrote:
| Forced +$30 per seat per month to get people loaded into
| their proprietary AI
| bananamogul wrote:
| 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.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| One source[1] says the first release of Excel (for the Mac,
| in 1985) had a price of $395, or about $1,200 in inflation-
| adjusted 2026 dollars.
|
| [1]: https://archive.org/details/history-of-PC
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| It's $8.30/month. It's cheaper than Netflix and Amazon Prime.
| snmx999 wrote:
| Over 50 years' time that's $4980.
| opan wrote:
| It's still the only free as in freedom office suite option I'm
| aware of. I do try my best to avoid needing such software at
| all (I prefer to stay inside vim), but it has its uses when
| dealing with files from other people, or niche stuff like
| importing XML and saving as a CSV.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| For what it's worth, AbiWord and Gnumeric are still around
| (but are of course much less capable).
| megnu wrote:
| Gnumeric is great. It's the only one that holds up with
| massive CSV files and remains snappy. So I tend to prefer
| it. Functions are more limited than Calc though.
| fhdkweig wrote:
| About 10 years ago the Ubuntu package manager borked my
| installation of LibreOffice (or maybe it was OpenOffice
| then). I only used it for spreadsheets and Gnumeric was
| able to open the ODS files just fine. There was only one
| function that I need to change (DaysInYear for handling
| leap years).
|
| If for any reason I have to go back to it, I think I can.
| MrDresden wrote:
| Some of us run unGoogled/M$ Linux systems and want offline
| functionality. None of those options you mentioned would work
| for us.
| maxloh wrote:
| For context, you cannot export a Google Doc in its native
| format and import the file later from another account.
|
| That's the price you pay: Google owns your data. You've sold
| your soul to them.
| linguae wrote:
| None of the tools that you mentioned except for LibreOffice and
| OpenOffice are free-as-in-freedom, and if you're using Linux on
| the desktop, then Microsoft Office and the Apple iWork suite
| are unavailable as desktop applications.
| allenrb wrote:
| 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?
| ;-)
| godot wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| If LO ceases to exist, then I will just use plain text
| typesetting tools.
| dangus wrote:
| OnlyOffice and its upcoming Euro Office derivative, which I
| already like better than LibreOffice.
| KronisLV wrote:
| 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).
| fhdkweig wrote:
| 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.
| kackerlacker wrote:
| 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.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| The questionnis: How does a community form, which can take a
| project tof that size? TDF andjvre Office cMd out of a long
| process of independent (from Sun Microsystems) contributions
| to OpenOffice, which at some point had a momentum to do a
| proper form and then another momentum to take over as the
| lead variant.
|
| For a successful fork you need a notable amount of people
| engaging in the fork.
| shevy-java wrote:
| > 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!
| tomrod wrote:
| Before Libre Office was Open Office.
|
| I take comfort that we would not be without a local office
| suite for long.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| 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.
| redeeman wrote:
| 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."
| gus_massa wrote:
| > _" 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.)
| bityard wrote:
| There is still Open Office: https://www.openoffice.org
| SilverElfin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| OnlyOffice? FreeOffice?
| maxloh wrote:
| FreeOffice is proprietary software, not "truly free" in the
| FOSS way.
| 12_throw_away wrote:
| 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.
| contingencies wrote:
| 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?
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| 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.
| jaggs wrote:
| Long live LibreOffice.
| gentleman11 wrote:
| 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?
| ssl-3 wrote:
| I guess we're just supposed to speculate about that, in
| contradiction of the title of the article.
| asveikau wrote:
| 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.
| charcircuit wrote:
| A lot of open source software has drama so it isn't surprising
| to me.
| bluGill wrote:
| Anything with more than a few humans will have drama. Most
| marriages have a lot and that is two people (who mostly
| manage anyway).
|
| 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)
| throwatdem12311 wrote:
| 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.
| cge wrote:
| 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.
| Aurornis wrote:
| 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 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.
| ma2kx wrote:
| It seems there opens a new market as Europe plans to abandon
| Microsoft products. First OnlyOffice / EuroOffice and now this...
| shevy-java wrote:
| I am confused.
|
| What is the main issue now?
| worik wrote:
| tl;dr the non-profit had acted outside the regulations for non-
| profits, to the benefit of some members and due to over eager
| action not actual dishonesty. Audits caught up with them, they
| have to change their ways.
| nialse wrote:
| 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!
| avazhi wrote:
| Classic open source drama which makes the entire open source/FOSS
| ecosystem look like dog shit.
| tzs wrote:
| 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?
| maxloh wrote:
| > 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?
|
| 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/
| kkfx wrote:
| 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.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Get. to. the. point.
| StrauXX wrote:
| I had the same impression. The introduction reads really
| unprofessionally.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| 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.
| garciansmith wrote:
| 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).
| _spduchamp wrote:
| This post seems yo raise speculation, not end it.
|
| Is LibreOffice at risk?
| codethief wrote:
| 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 starts 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...
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