Let's put an end to the speculation [Response to Collabora and Michael Meeks]
Posted by buovjaga@reddit | linux | View on Reddit | 91 comments
Posted by buovjaga@reddit | linux | View on Reddit | 91 comments
MatchingTurret@reddit
With the most important contributors gone, is LibreOffice now slowly withering away? Similar to Openoffice which theoretically still exists?
ronaldvr@reddit
Why? A voting board member is something else than a developer. There are no restrictions on that
mrtruthiness@reddit
To be clear, this isn't about "board members". There are 7 TDF Board Members. This is about "TDF Membership" ... which also has voting privileges. And that has gone from approx 150 to 120. That membership is all about determining the direction that the project is going.
If one loses privileges in regard to the direction of the project, it's possible that it may be advantageous to fork.
MatchingTurret@reddit
Because these developers are employed and payed by Colabora.
Irverter@reddit
*paid
snake_on_the_case@reddit
Plaid
ivosaurus@reddit
TDF hasn't actually prevented anyone from making commits or MRs to the project.
But we'll have to see if activity drops like a rock, or not.
mrtruthiness@reddit
Unless Collabora forks LO (and establishes its own trademarks), it will probably continue on at a slower-pace-than-its-already-very-slow-pace.
Personally, I'm voting for a Collabora fork because I'm tired of TDF.
tilsgee@reddit
How so?. I'm out of loop
mrtruthiness@reddit
Mike Saunders (from TDF) spends more time bashing AOO than he spends promoting LO and he seems to confuse those two activities.
TDF has made very little progress on LO.
The progress that I've noted has mainly been done by Collabora employees and now TDF has rejected their membership.
They've recently added some "donate" advertisements to their release of LO. That doesn't bug me too much ... but I would still say it's "tiring". Also, in light of the more recent changes, those who say that you can just take that "donate" button out: That's true. However with the recent change in trademark policy, you can't redistribute your changes as "LibreOffice" or with its other trademarks ... and that's doubly tiring.
AnsibleAnswers@reddit
Well, you have the Collabora devs who claimed that they will still contribute if allowed and TDF saying that they are allowed. Am I missing something?
notenglishwobbly@reddit
The in-fighting is just not boding well at all.
I guess we'll always have Collabora? Irony?
EverythingsBroken82@reddit
perhaps they will just find a way to collaborate further and it's just much ado about nothing
ScratchHistorical507@reddit
Yeah, they are done for if they don't do a 180 in the next couple of days.
rbrownsuse@reddit
So let me get this straight
The TDF was founded only with the support of its ecosystem companies and had exclusive control over which of those companies could use the LibreOffice trademarks
But this arrangement was found to be legally dubious
So rather than correcting it by changing the legal structure of the TDF, they went for a rug pull and have alienated the actual financial and code contributing backers without which TDF and LibreOffice would not exist
That’s a bold move to say the least
MatchingTurret@reddit
Is this still kind of an option? The TDF probably won't disband itself, but the dissed contributors could build an alternative, maybe around Apache Openoffice.
ScratchHistorical507@reddit
Of course. They won't do it themselves, but if everyone - both companies and individuals - just stop working with them and giving them money and instead set up a new non-profit and a fork of LO, it should be fairly easy.
mrtruthiness@reddit
Of course, TDF will still have the branding and TM rights for "LibreOffice" ... just as AOO has the branding and TM rights for "OpenOffice".
ScratchHistorical507@reddit
Exactly. And just as OOo has been basically forgotten by almost everyone, so needs LO and TDF to be lost in oblivion.
mrtruthiness@reddit
Nope. It still has a large adoption on Windows.
Honestly, I was thinking of making a snap and a flatpak of AOO, but I haven't found the energy to approach the Apache Foundation on whether I could use the OO branding in flathub and the snap store.
ScratchHistorical507@reddit
I very much doubt the number of 40,000 daily downloads is true in any way. Even if everyone that ever used it reinstalled it on a regular basis, this wouldn't be that realistic.
Also, why would you bother wasting any time on that ancient piece of junk? It hasn't seen any meaningful update in way over a decade, its support for anything but the baseline ODF 1.2 and earlier is basically non-existent and it's highly questionable if all security issues that are being found are fixed, not to mention that barely anyone will look for them in AOO. This should have been marked as deprecated at least a decade ago.
mrtruthiness@reddit
You have the right to ignore facts. AOO posts the history of daily downloads over time.
Because "staying the same" does not imply "getting worse". In fact it means that it is literally the same. And it was fine. And the fact is that IMO it still does a better job of kerning than LO.
The only feature it lacks that I would like is that AOO doesn't support the new MS files/format (e.g. it supports doc, but not docx).
ScratchHistorical507@reddit
And who's Apache that I should blindly trust numbers that are extremely unlikely to be true or at least current?
Also, staying the same literally means staying at the state of things of ~ 2010. And at that time AOO already wasn't good, which was the whole reason why people bothered forking it.
Even the support for the old MS binary formats will be worse, as for all I remember, MS partially published some information about these formats at some point after 2010. I doubt these changes made their way into AOO. And for all I know, a fresh installation of LO won't default to ODF v1.2 or older, so AOO won't even be able to open every ODF document, unless you explicitly tell LO to save as non-extended ODF 1.2.
mrtruthiness@reddit
https://www.apache.org/ . The Apache Foundation has been around nearly twice as long as TDF (26 years vs. 15 years) and are much more trustworthy in my opinion.
https://www.openoffice.org/stats/downloads.html
But I'm sure you'll just ignore it. And you know what that makes you? Hint: It starts with an "i".
It was the best FOSS Office alternative at the time. But given that you don't seem to understand the history: It started as a commercial office product in the 1990's (StarOffice) and was purchased by Sun Inc under whose ownership it was (slowly) open sourced. I contributed to it in the mid 2000's. Didn't you ever wonder why "libreoffice" was soft-linked to "soffice". That's a remnant of the StarOffice connection.
The reason people forked it was that it came with the Apache2 license and, at the time of the fork, was controlled by Oracle, who they didn't trust. The previous contributors wanted to fork it because of license reasons and Oracle --- they chose a copyleft license (MPLv2). Oracle, instead, gave the OO code to the Apache Foundation (with what I'm assuming was the condition that it always be licensed Apache2).
Seeing as how you don't seemed to have used, it you wouldn't know. It handles old MS formats very well.
As an aside: If I need to convert something from docx to doc so I can use AOO ... it's one command line run.
Clearly you don't know anything about ODF if you think your statement is remotely true.
There might be some features that it won't handle (e.g. storing of solver details), but it's compatible. The program will simply skip over tags it doesn't recognize.
Again, you would know if you bothered to try AOO. But, I'm sure you would rather speculate and be wrong than learn anything.
And, since you know so little, here is an article written a few days ago. It explains why they are switching from LO to AOO: https://www.howtogeek.com/why-i-quit-libreoffice-for-its-open-source-rival/
Irverter@reddit
Would be easier to fork LibreOffice than to redo/port all the work from LibreOffice to Apache OpenOffice
LvS@reddit
This is about brand names, not about the code.
So you'd take the libreoffice code and name it "OpenOffice".
Existing-Tough-6517@reddit
If the self-dealing is the problem what solution doesn't involve throwing them out?
They can still be paid for services they just can't be payer and payee at a non profit paying the for profit
rbrownsuse@reddit
The self dealing is only a problem because they built the TDF as a non-profit Foundation and not a legal entity that would have been more sensible for the stakeholders of LibreOffice.
LO was always going to need a body that could embrace both community AND corporate sponsorship, engagement, and empowerment
There’s vereine, co-operative and other foundational structures all of which would have likely been more useful than this one which was clearly never fit for purpose
ScratchHistorical507@reddit
One can only hope all the other companies drop TDF like a hot potato, make a new non-profit and continue LO as a fork. TDF just crossed a line they probably can't ever recover from. It's time to move on.
RenlyHoekster@reddit
That's just BS and finger-pointing. Collabora crossed a line, TDF crossed another line, and now who is to blame? The point is the TDF was founded in 2010, Collabora is a member, and the way Collabora was trying to stear the TDF recently was not in keeping with the Foundation rules, so either Collabora stops doing what it is doing or it gets kicked out. And guess what happened?
ScratchHistorical507@reddit
I really don't see how Collabora has broken the Foundation rules. It sounds more of an excuse to justify TDFs utter incompetence.
AnsibleAnswers@reddit
I’m by no means an expert on non-profit law, but the notion that TDF accidentally broke the law and remedied it by removing members from companies taking legal action against TDF is at least a rationale that can be verified or falsified. The removed members basically said it was a conspiracy that favored non-technical decision makers over developers. They’ve been quite vague.
grandinj@reddit
Nobody took any kind of actual legal action. TDF threatened Collabora with legal action, but has never actually pulled the trigger.
mrtruthiness@reddit
Are you sure? TDF's removing Collabora employees as members of TDF was done so on the basis of "legal dispute" which, to me, means an official "actual legal action".
grandinj@reddit
To me "actual legal action" means "filing something with a court or other statuatory body". That has not occurred. [Full Disclosure: I am one of the people ejected from TDF for this "legal dispute"]
mrtruthiness@reddit
Then the TDF Board is taking a wide view of what "legal dispute" means. With that view, I have a "legal dispute" with just about everybody: Trump, ICE, JD Vance, the US Senate, .... ;)
Far_Calligrapher1334@reddit
I was already admittedly biased due to the nature of his communication all over the place to distrust this as at least a misrepresentation, but does this mean Meeks is flat out lying here?
grandinj@reddit
TDF sent lawyers letters to various people demanding various things. I dont think that counts as actual legal action. Perhaps meeks does.
[Full Disclosure: I sometimes work for Collabora, and was ejected from TDF as part of the purge of Collabora people]
ScratchHistorical507@reddit
Exactly, people that have no clue what they are doing are in power, making decisions that are basically killing the entire project. And I really don't see in what capacity anyone had taken legal actions against TDF, beyond the fact that TDF was told to fix their issues or otherwise could lose their non-profit status.
ronaldvr@reddit
See: https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/02/libreoffice_online_deatticized/
This is clearly a conflict of interest (as clearly outlined in exactly the auditors objections) as Meeks was at that time both a voting member and ceo of Collabora
ScratchHistorical507@reddit
What absolute nonsense LibreOffice Online was always a Collabora Project, they have always been basically the only people contributing to it. LibreOffice never made any use of it either, beyond a very bad Android viewer. And it just didn't make sense to revive the long-dead LO Online. They should've given up on that a long time ago. And again, I do not see any breaking of rules.
newsflashjackass@reddit
While reading this I can't help but suspect I will inevitably read a similar article about how "The Mozilla Foundation" killed / almost killed Firefox.
buovjaga@reddit (OP)
No, TDF members can run for the board (and membership committee) and get elected by votes from members. Seats are not awarded outside of elections. It was just an incorrect decision to selectively allow the free use of trademarks, there was no additional complexity.
Enthusedchameleon@reddit
"Let's put an end to the speculation" but fills the post with acronyms without explanation (I have no idea what is that all about the TDC, it just says it was spun out and existed and had dubious purposes, but what was it? don't know).
Leaves plenty of space for speculation with regards to what legal action was taken, by whom, to whom, in what order, etc. I understand the "we can't let you be in the board since you were part of the company that auditors complained might be self-dealing", and "we'll limit voting rights for people who are taking legal action" makes sense, but we don't know what legal action, and the other side says that TDF is the one taking legal action against them (and that this was a conspiracy to be able to ban them or whatever).
It says it has to start from the very beginning, but then jumps around in time, for no apparent reason; "it started" -> "people who helped were going to try and kill LO" (how? who? when?) -> "when it started it began with issues already, the preferential treatment with licensing and self-dealing contracts" -> "it would be easy to solve in 2021" -> "that aggravated issues from 2020"
And so on.
Like, I think you need to run your attempts at writing a summary of the situation or even your attempts at a cohesive text through someone who isn't involved in the situation themselves. This is badly written, doesn't explain enough, presents more things that would have to be explained while, again, not explaining them.
My DM's are open.
BashfulMelon@reddit
This dysfunction is too deep. Probably the only people who can piece together an accurate understanding were those involved in it.
Let's all take sides and argue about it.
Obvious-Hunt19@reddit
Yeah I can’t understand a fucking word of that post. Assumed wayayyyyy too much context on the reader’s part which is a feature of all good drama llama situations
TeutonJon78@reddit
Seems like Collobra employees were many of the early TDF directors and they used bounty funds to pay themselves and Colabra for dev work. Not necessarily corrupt if they did the work, but easy for corruption. Hence why government auditors were saying they coukd lose non-profit status, which would mean lots of taxes would need to be paid.
And it also seems those same self-dealing directors/members were also preventing any change from fixing it while also making a second corporate entity to effectively take over completely.
TL;DR: seems Collobra has been trying to functionally take over LibO for years (from the beginning) via various methods and the BoD was finally able to cut it off. The issue is that Collobra employees do most of the core LibO development.
LvS@reddit
At the start there were about 4 groups who were participating in Libreoffice development:
Collabora - also doing consulting but mainly trying to turn libreoffice into a web office suite for their customers
A German consulting company called allotropia
Red Hat, Canonical, Suse(?) (others?) sponsoring developers to have an Open office suite in their distros
everyone else - lots of volunteers, some self-employed people
This worked quite well because it was a broad coalition with similar goals (a better office suite) but different enough targets (distros vs consulting vs online) to not compete with each other.
It's also important to note that there was no power imbalance, nobody had something close to a majority to take over the project.
In 2016 or so Canonical dropped their desktop team and Red Hat and other distros had a round of layoffs where they refocused their desktop team to no longer focus on libreoffice. As a result of that, the developers working for them were reassigned which I guess they didn't like so they left and found jobs at Collabora and allotropia (I think all of them, but I might be missing someone - let's say the vast majority).
The result was that you now only had 3 groups and one less goal: The focus on the desktop app was much reduced because no people were paid to work on it anymore. It was mainly the volunteers who did that.
A year ago Collabora and allotropia merged. So now pretty much all the core developers who were paid to work on libreoffice are employed by Collabora.
You can look at the table of developers by commits in Michael Meek's blog post how the top 7 developers are all working for Collabora.
The Document Foundation has tried to hire some developers, but a foundation is not really set up to do that unless it has solid financial backing (read: committed corporate or government sponsors). With a puny $1.5M per year you cannot fund an office suite.
Malsententia@reddit
Ah, so it wasn't just me. There some business speak, some legal speak, some PR speak, with a few grains of actual real "what this means for users and developers" speak.
2rad0@reddit
Is this the inevitable end-state of any Java(r)(tm) project? Buried in legal drama?
nothingtoseehr@reddit
I was initially pretty neutral to negative on this because I really dislike libreoffice and the way I've seen the community act about it or so many people's resistance to change (the good old "I've adapted to this shitty thing therefore it's good and you shouldn't change it!")
But reading this I kinda feel bad for them? From what I see the issue is basically that TDF was created with founders that had wildly different expectations for what it should be.
Be it out of malice or naivety, the resulting structure was one full of glaring issues: mainly the fact that the board of directors had members that were also affiliated with companies that TDF contracts from, an obvious conflict of interest
The creation of another "shadow" company behind everyone (although I obviously cannot comment on how 'hidden' it was) is always a massive red flag to me and something I actively detest from anyone. Mozilla Corporation being an example (although maybe not a good one)
The founders that were on the open source/non-profit side seemingly reached an ultimatum and decided to unilaterally cut off all business-affiliated entities on the foundation. An act that solves the pressing conflict of interest issues, but also alienates most of the people that make the thing run
I have to say I'll have a kinder eye for libreoffice now, it takes balls to do this out of principles even if it threatens the entire thing. Still don't like libreoffice, but I can massively respect the decision they took. I'll look around the bugtracker when I have time, see if there's anything needing my skills :) These overly negatives comments around it also seem a bit fabricated to me, especially on a sub such as r/linux that hates everything that's not GPL
I hope it all ends well, and that one day someone (corporate or not) can fix the damn spreadsheet ui!
ronaldvr@reddit
Well this misunderstanding all stems from the fallacy that a developer needs to be a board member too. There is no reason to wear more than 1 hat. But obviously it was/is in the interest of Collabora to be able to steer the TDF policies (Which is dubious imo)
mrtruthiness@reddit
No.
This "misunderstanding" has more to do with the change in the free terms for the use of LO and TDF trademarks. That is what is changing. That is the crux of the issue and the reason for the lawsuit (why didn't the article mention the lawsuit???). The loss of "membership" is a consequence of that lawsuit and a Bylaws change in Jan 2026 that doesn't allow members involved in a legal action.
Also: you don't understand the difference between "board member" and "member":
Board Member for TDF. This is a list of 7. https://www.documentfoundation.org/board/
Voting Member of TDF. This is "member". This is a list of 123 ( https://www.documentfoundation.org/members/ ) and a few weeks ago was a list of 150 or so ... and this significant loss of membership is due to TDF's legal action against Collabora.
Commit privileges for LO.
You haven't distinguished between (1) and (2). And membership from both has been denied to Collabora employees.
ronaldvr@reddit
Yes and for the same reason. If you are playing semantics fine: I changed it the actual reason still stands and remains the same.
mrtruthiness@reddit
Semantics. If you don't know the difference between a Board of Directors and a normal Member, that's your problem. Seriously.
And the "misunderstanding" is not about "voting member", or "membership". The issue is the fact that TDF is changing its terms in regard to the use of their trademarks, etc.
Irverter@reddit
May I ask why?
Rialagma@reddit
Yeah, as usual, the commercial interests were tainting LF's raison d'etre and this is them fixing it. Sure, they should've set up a solid structure from the beginning, but no one's perfect.
ucsilahsor@reddit
Fix the ui first
D3PyroGS@reddit
what's wrong with it?
mrlinkwii@reddit
what a very bad look from the TDF
Sirusho_Yunyan@reddit
Seeing politics and bickering power play in FOSS is such a turnoff. Let's just make cool stuff!!
QuackSomeEmma@reddit
Almost seems like free software is a political idea 🤔
Misicks0349@reddit
Unworkable.
irasponsibly@reddit
Unfortunately making cool stuff requires people having resources (time and money) and agreeing on what stuff to make.
Happy_Phantom@reddit
Clear as mud
Serious_Berry_3977@reddit
This did nothing to clear up the matter for me. In fact, it made things even more confusing. The fact that this all came out in the public on April 1st doesn't help either, because I seriously thought it was an April Fool's prank.
I don't see Collabora as necessarily in the wrong here. The TDF was setup from the very start incorrectly and it took over a decade to resolve if I'm understanding this blog post correctly.
Looking at the relationship between CodeWeavers and Wine is interesting because it's very similar to Collabora and LibreOffice on the surface. That is until you look at the project organization of Wine:
While I dislike having only one maintainer making all the decisions and think it should be a board, they have created separation between the financial and technical parts of Wine. I wonder why TDF wasn't setup like this from the beginning. From what I can tell (and please correct me if I'm misunderstanding), the board was responsible for both financial and technical designs. That's a recipe for corporate influence to wreck havoc.
I understand why Collabora is upset, they didn't do anything wrong other than supoprt the project. How they handled getting removed is a whole different unprofessional manner entirely. TDF was setup incorrectly from the beginning, they're not wrong for trying to fix the issue but this is always going to result in drama.
As soon as it was found that TDF was violating laws, it should have been dissolved and taken over by a new non-profit (or the Software Freedom Conservancy) to run the financial aspect. I'm sure I'm grossly misunderstanding non-profit law, but to my untrained eyes this was just a situation waiting to blow up in TDF's faces.
zeno0771@reddit
I have been evangelizing about LO since v24. The suite is leaps and bounds away from its comatose and terminal origins and yet everyone I talk to still has a bad taste from having tried OOo and discovering that it was not an exact to-the-pixel MS Office clone. There was no way it could be, but end-users don't care about technicalities or how Microslop was munging the OOXML standard; they care about their formatting being run through a Ninja food-processor. It's made tremendous strides and we have it rolled out where I work side-by-side with MS Office for those who don't need the MS version for a very specific technical reason.
They've pivoted away from their multiseat GUI glorified terminal server, but Userful was partially responsible for contributing to the disdain since it only barely worked most of the time, so when libraries or schools provided it, it was even more crippled than normal. I have not used Collabora's version but the timing here sucks for me considering I was about to roll out NextCloud; one of the big selling points was LO and I was fine with treating Collabora's version as the real deal.
Xu_Lin@reddit
Does that mean LibreOffice will just… die?
buovjaga@reddit (OP)
No, we will keep hiring more developers and continue developing it as usual, probably focusing even more on efficiency of maintenance. Google willing, we will again run several Summer of Code projects this year.
The onboarding and initial mentoring of new volunteer contributors (to all areas) and internship applicants has been done by myself for years now. These dats we have many contacts (universities etc.) for recruiting volunteers. The only limiting factor is our own availability - we do need to sleep once in a while.
ucsilahsor@reddit
Do you think a project of this size will run on GSoC :d
buovjaga@reddit (OP)
Which project idea did you have in mind?
GTK4 upstream has been missing accessibility APIs that we need. I think the last missing one is related to sane handling of spreadsheet data.
mrtruthiness@reddit
I've got to say that I was already very tired and disgusted with Mike Saunders (TDF) bashing AOO. One can promote LO without bashing someone else's Free product.
Honestly, I would rather use AOO now. Even if it's a little stale, it has better font kerning and much less drama.
Xu_Lin@reddit
Thank you! LibreOffice is pretty much all I use and glad to hear you guys will keep the banner flying 🙌🙌
kornerz@reddit
What's the context, are we witnessing another ideological fork of a big OSS project?
buovjaga@reddit (OP)
Not about any ideology, but longstanding disagreements on how to govern in a way that does not put The Document Foundation in legal jeopardy.
mrtruthiness@reddit
Except that initially it was part of the founding ideology to allow free (as in beer) access to trademarks. That ideology is in conflict when one of the companies that was correctly using those trademarks for free, was a "for profit" company and TDF wanted to retain its non-profit/charitable status.
MatchingTurret@reddit
Rock and a hard place, but the current outcome has to be almost the worst case (absolute worst case would have been the loss of the non-profit status).
martyn_hare@reddit
No. You're witnessing Collabora crying because they just lost a future Unique Selling Point (USP) for their Collabora Office suite which they spent a lot of time, money and investment on. It's all business, not ideology because Collabora exists to make money and wanted to steer TDF to their own benefit. It's just that what they tried to do failed because it fell foul of a whole bunch of rules needed to keep non-profits from colluding with for-profits.
I think Collabora sees itself as being like CodeWeavers, and in many ways, they're not wrong.
Their USP was supplying a super rock solid, commercially supported downstream LTS of LibreOffice (think: Fedora vs. RHEL; Wine vs. CrossOver) which businesses could rely on and have someone available to phone up for technical support whenever they wanted it, like the good old days. Businesses would pay Collabora for updates and support and revenue would be used to improve upstream in the process, since each new release would need a certain amount of polishing upstream anyway. But the thing is, LibreOffice is too good, it doesn't need hardening or an LTS to serve most businesses, and even in the Linux world, we're moving towards Flatpaks which could let anyone hang back on a known good version and take advantage of sandboxing.
When Collabora saw the success of Microsoft Office Online they decided to take the defunct idea of a "LibreOffice Online" to make Collabora Office Online, so they started contributing all the necessary bits to support an online-focused fork upstream, while keeping most of the goodies in their Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE) repository. Huzzah, they now have a USP again! Let the money roll in boys!!!
Fast forward a little while... The Document Foundation has a reality check on what is going on as all the competition has moved on from a local desktop client. They now need a way to continue to fulfill their mission statement or risk being accused of being in cahoots with Collabora. So now they're reviving LibreOffice Online, and this is a huge problem for Collabora. You see, CODE is deliberately engineered with limitations (10 documents open at once, 20 collaborators) so Collabora can sell products but by design LibreOffice Online wouldn't have this because there's no motive to do so. Also, all that work Collabora put in on the backend? Well, LibreOffice gets to benefit from that plus use their brand name for a non-profit marketing headstart.
..and so Collabora is once again losing their USP. Sad times. Sucks to be them.
NikNKS@reddit
have they reintroduced limitations? AFAIK they were removed some years ago
martyn_hare@reddit
Ah, I might have missed them removing the limits. I have no reason to believe they'd re-add them.
Also worth noting they made their desktop package very affordable for individuals running Windows and macOS via the built-in app stores, where it seems like you pay once and it updates forever. It's a damn shame they don't seem to make that same offer available for Linux, at least not last I checked.
zeno0771@reddit
Fantastic summary. Thank you for this.
AnsibleAnswers@reddit
Sensible summary.
MatchingTurret@reddit
Sounds like a pretty good summary.
Except that now LibreOffice has lost its most important contributors. Probably sucks even more for the future of LibreOffice.
martyn_hare@reddit
Everyone will be just fine, LibreOffice and Collabora included. They'll keep calm and carry on.
Collabora is doing the same thing that CodeWeavers did to adapt their business to a changing world in the form of doubling down on openness and FOSS in general by obtaining lucrative contracts to code what businesses need in a way that's permanently maintained by upstream projects.
Contributions from Collabora will still continue to flow to LibreOffice desktop apps because they have customers to serve, and it's still easier to upstream those fixes impacting the latest LO versions than not to. Likewise, just because LibreOffice Online exists as a thing does not mean Collabora won't try to find a way to make things work to keep their name out there, they just lost sway over how TDF allocates funds and administers the project itself - that's all.
RenlyHoekster@reddit
This. We've seen it happen many times before in similar constellations of FOSS projects with commercial contributions.
MatchingTurret@reddit
With the "LibreOffice CodeWeavers" now gone, is there a Valve waiting in the wings to take over?
tuxooo@reddit
Read the article idk. There is drama in the office suites projects.
MatchingTurret@reddit
The article represents the point of view of the TDF, so it's obviously biased.
kornerz@reddit
Well, I did - but for someone out of context the article is essentially "There were some biased posts by "them" and we want to put the end to speculation" with an assumption that the reader is already aware of the actual issue.
Far_Calligrapher1334@reddit
I can't see how Collabora will come away as the right party here, considering their founder(?)'s public activity has been childish shit-flinging and accusatory hit and run posts in public that I can't see as anything else than intentionally trying to cause damage to TDF. Some people really need a PR course, or something.
ScratchHistorical507@reddit
"At the time, nobody could imagine that the companies that had supported OpenOffice.org until then would create a project to kill LibreOffice."
Thanks, this tells me everything I need to know, and nothing of it is any kind of positive. I think it's time to just let LO and the TDF die and continue with a fork. They've just lost their mind getting rid of most of the people that kept LO alive for all those years.