LibreOffice Drama: The Document Foundation Removes Collabora Developers in One Sweep
https://itsfoss.com/news/document-foundation-collabora-feud/Open linkView original on lemmy.worldSyndicated from the fediverse. Read and engage on the original instance.
View original on lemmy.worldhttps://itsfoss.com/news/document-foundation-collabora-feud/Open linkView original on lemmy.world
15 replies
Link to those bylaws from Jan 15
https://community.documentfoundation.org/t/vote-adopt-version-1-of-community-bylaws/13472
Quote from that link [bylaws] above
Back to the original linked article:
So without details, all the article really details is that this happened. The why is murky. It seems the TDF is trying to protect itself, but there's no description of Collabra or TDFs legal dispute.
The conflict of interests regarding the online version of Libreoffice was already bad enough even without a legal case looming over it.
While, pragmatically and unfortunately, big open source projects need to involve commercial partners to scale, depending on a single commercial partner is always a recipe for disaster.
Honestly this is a big nothingburger. Without further details there's nothing much we can really conclude other than TDF and Collabora being in a legal dispute. Nothing conclusive really
I've never heard of collabora. I use libre all the time. Can anyone give me a tldr?
they make a thing that lets libreoffice work online, like google docs
They also make an android app
Is there anyone in the open source office suite space that has their shit together?
I was looking for alternatives now that I'm committed to migrating away from Microsoft, and it feels like moving from one room where everything's on fire to... another room where everything's also on fire.
It's kind of a miracle if anything in the open source space isn't on fire. The benefit of closed-source is you get to bite the bullet once, have the same issues and get told the same workarounds as everybody else.
But to your original question: LibreOffice still works all right for desktop editing, and if the OpenOffice debacle from many years ago is an indicator, it'll probably still keep running with marginal updates until the heat death of the universe
Well if we're looking at a "history repeats itself" event, I still hope it won't be Collabora replacing LO as the default FOSS office suite.
Is it actually worse in terms of features? I only use LibreOffice and can't tell, maybe I don't know enough to compare to anything else besides in looks.
I don't know about the features, the thing that makes me wary is that Collabora is a private company, unlike TDF which is non-profit.
LO works fine, it won't suddenly stop because of this. But it may gradually decline, that's to be seen... I'll stick with LO for now.
The question is: is LibreOfrice now as dead as LibreOffice is? How significant are the contributions by Collabora?
Your first question is a challenge to understand and could do with clarification. The second question is orthogonal to the disputes and membership situation, and may be unaffected if the people involved don't conflate the two.
If you're trying to ask whether LibreOffice is dead then I think the answer is no. Because right now, even with minimal updates for small bug fixes or security or what not it does what a lot of people need it to do.
What I look for from that office suite today is very similar to what I wanted from it a decade ago and probably a decade from now it will also be filling a very similar role. So of course it's good to modernize and continue to make improvements, but at the same time a lot of the things that humans want to do on our computers for work and hobbies are largely the same as what they were in decades past. So if we have something that's stable then we win.