You’d think if there was one corner of the open source world where you wouldn’t find drama it’d be open source office suites, but it turns out we could not have been more wrong. First, there’s The Document Foundation, stewards of LibreOffice, ejecting a ton of LibreOffice contributors.
In the ongoing saga of The Document Foundation (TDF), their Membership Committee has decided to eject from membership all Collabora staff and partners. That includes over thirty people who have contributed faithfully to LibreOffice for many years. It is interesting to see a formal meritocracy eject so many, based on unproven legal concerns and guilt by association. This includes seven of the top ten core committers of all time (excluding release engineers) currently working for Collabora Productivity. The move is the culmination of TDF losing a large number of founders from membership over the last few years with: Thorsten Behrens, Jan ‘Kendy’ Holesovsky, Rene Engelhard, Caolan McNamara, Michael Meeks, Cor Nouws and Italo Vignoli no longer members. Of the remaining active founders, three of the last four are paid TDF staff (of whom none are programming on the core code).
↫ Micheal Meeks
The end result seems to be that Collabora is effectively forking LibreOffice, which feels like we’re back where we were 15 years ago when LibreOffice forked from OpenOffice. There seems to be a ton of drama and infighting here that I’m not particularly interested in, but it’s sad to see such drama and infighting result in needless complications for developers, end users, and distributors alike.
As if this wasn’t enough, there’s also forking drama in OnlyOffice land, the other open source office suite, licensed under the AGPL. This ope source office suite has been forked by Nextcloud and IONOS into Euro-Office, in pursuit of digital sovereignty in the EU. It’s also not an entirely unimportant detail that OnlyOffice is Russian, with most of its developers residing in Russia.
Anyway, the OnlyOffice team has not taken this in stride, claiming there’s a violation of the AGPL license going on here, specifically because OnlyOffice adds contradictory attribution terms to the AGPL. It’s a complicated story, but it does seem most experts in this area seem to disagree with OnlyOffice’s interpretation.
We’re in for another messy time.
I am really split on that OnlyOffice thing:
On the one side, the Euro Office initiative is great and they had to fork it from the Russian origin in order to find any acceptance anywhere.
At the same time, somehow it just does not feel right and even may hit Russian developers who were in support of the European cause.
I am contributing to H2 database and DBeaver (both Russian dominated projects) and its hard to make a good call here. 🙁
Agreed.
The whole idea of collective guilt is very hard for me to swallow. I’ve lived in Russia for a while, many many moons ago, and still have good friends over there. One of them always goes back home, even after a phd in Singapore and tons of student debt. He is the kind of person who wants to help the country get better. He is safe from conscription due to a disability but the economy has basically disappeared so he is living out of his savings and moved to his brother’s couch. Another one, an archaeologist, gets 150 EUR equiv per month working at a museum and, well, she has even been avoiding talking to her friends abroad because of the fear of losing her job (the government is all very keen to find an excuse to get rid of anyone who is not essential to the war effort). She has kids to raise, after all.
So by applying collective guilt, you try to increase popular pressure against the regime but, at the same time, you punish people who are just trying to survive and after all the daily struggles won’t have any energy to engage politically.
I don’t know any Russian who is in favor of what is going on. Polls are skewed because people are afraid of expressing their true views in public.
One thing that many abroad do not understand is that… in most countries, even less developed ones, there’s still a social contract of, no matter how badly the state performs its functions, the state is a resource that belongs to society. In Russia, historically, it is the opposite: the state exists for itself and Russians are a resource to be spent by the state in its service.
It is all a big shame, because they are a kind, caring and sharing folk, culturally bright and unbelievably welcoming. It would be nice if the leaders of the world could take their heads out of their rectums for a change. Such a waste of time, money, life, talent, and energy everywhere.
Shiunbird,
I think this is pretty well understood by anyone who has taken a deep look at russian relations, or have lived in a country neighboring russia.
However, there is an unfortunate, and undeniable issue that this also means any developer who has to reside in the country can be subject to state coercion. This person could be the best among humanity, yet still an outside observer can never be certain of their actions.
Wish there was a solution, yet, this is the reality we live in…
Yup.
All the idiocy happening in the world makes me way sadder than angry to be honest.
Its just truly sad, all of it.
Agreed and everything you said could also apply to China. Beautiful and intelligent and culturally rich people, moronic and hateful government. And now, as an American living under an even more moronic and hateful government, I fully understand and appreciate what the people of nations like Russia and China deal with and have dealt with for decades under their oppressive and evil governments.
Unfortunately as technology advances it’s becoming much easier for evil regimes to control and surveil their populations. I feel we are at a tipping point in society as a whole, and we may not be able to come back from this. Overpopulation, the explosion of the “AI” industry and its attempts to make everyday people obsolete so the rich can get richer, and the seemingly imminent collapse of the global economy thanks in large part to the orange turd in chief, all feels like the perfect storm brewing to put us into a new Dark Age.
@Morgan,
spot-on: race or color and even religion barely matters. Normal people just want to bring up their families and feel some purpose.
We talk about how open source is better, the collaborative spirit and other shit but now someone in TDF has an economic interest in online office suites and is trying to sabotage Collabora, a company that unlike others, and I think all of us can think of some examples, follows not only the letter but the spirit of open licenses and is also one of the greatest contributors to open source licenses.
I am really, really mad and things like this are what make companies and organizations doubt about migrating to open source.
jgfenix,
I believe open source for corprations is “solved”. Or at least reached an equilibrium.
GPL/AGPL for things they want to share, but prefer to give commercial, expensive licenses for.
MIT/Apache/BSD for things they want to consume. Sometimes even contribute to.
Anything in between is iffy. If a license is not know, they won’t even touch it.
(Edit: The business model? There is none for directly writing software anymore. It is services and other auxillary things around that software)
(Edit 2: AWS was able to shirk AGPL, so that part might start being shakier again)
I wasn’t talking about that. I was talking about organizations adopting Libreoffice instead of MSOffice for example .
jgfenix,
I might have missed something.
But isn’t the AGPL style / online service separation essentially the root cause? Both open source vendors want to tap into the same customer base, and they want to sell subscriptions, putting them at direct competition.
This is one area things don’t work, as again, they want “open source” for either name recognition or free patches. But they want to sell software as SAAS.
Open source definition worked great when we distributed binaries. But when Collabora writes 70% of the code, yet TDF wants to sell it to the same customers… how would they reconcile?
It looks like Collabora fired the first shot, creating an offline (aka competitor to LibreOffice) version of Collabora.
So, The Document Foundation is at the position where their biggest contributor is launching a competing product. Add in the fact that Collabora is a for-profit company, and you can see why The Document Foundation is suspicious that Collabora may withhold features for their own offline office suite (by diverging the codebases and refusing to port them to LibreOffice) or even pull an Android and start moving various bits and pieces to proprietary software (it’s not like most users will care, as the Android and Chrome experience has showed us).
So, it’s understandable that The Document Foundation tries to build a moat to save whatever they can of their non-profit. But let’s be real, Collabora owns too many cards here. That’s not a good situation…
kurkosdr,
I’ll be honest, I can’t catch all details of this Game of Thronesque situation. Open source companies each trying to undermine each other, since they need to grow.
TDF vs Collabora will probably be studied as a warning story for future generations.
The problem is something as large as an office suite needs a strong corporate sponsor (same with operating systems, browsers, IDEs, which are pretty much now controlled one or more powerful entities)
Or of course we can all use AbiWord and KCalc.
It is a complicated story, but as far as I have been able to follow it, @kurkosdr summarized it correct.
Although I have some sympathy for Collabora: they are paying a lot of fine engineers who are also contributing to other OS projects.
This is where I expect much more from the Europe Union and/or the European Governments: Do you really want to continue throwing billions of USD into the Americas or would it not make sense to use a fraction of that amount and support local content (like Indonesia and a few other countries do).
I would immediately vote for any party making Open Source in Government Software mandatory. What is paid with taxes should belong to the people. (And I am not a socialist, but a capitalist interested in sanitizing and preserving the system.)
Andreas Reichel,
I would be really on board with this in theory. But in practice EU has proven themselves to be a very ineffective bureaucracy, fighting over bottle caps while US and China are having a global economic war for AI supremacy and outer space access.
Wish things were different
Now, this is a thing we can get behind.
There might be nuances to what constitutes open source (with this particular discussion, I think Collabora, or TDF might be steering along a gray boundary and might be disqualifie for example)
Did you mean AbiWord and Gnumeric? Because KCalc is a calculator, not a spreadsheet app.
But yes, the vast majority of home users don’t need anything more than a Word-compatible document processor and a basic spreadsheet, both of which can work for the average user. With AbiWord you have to be careful about formatting and make sure you have croscore or whatever font package for your OS gives you the Microsoft-alike fonts. And Gnumeric doesn’t have pivot tables or other advanced features found in Excel.
Beyond that, if you’re okay with Google snooping on your work and possibly using it to train Gemini, you can always use their online app suite. Google Sheets in particular is very close to what you can achieve with Excel, minus a few higher math functions that statisticians and mathematicians use, and those folks will have other more specific tools at their disposal like R.
Morgan,
There was a KDE Office suite back then. I thought it was KCalc, my bad.
I used AbiWord a lot back in the day. Even after StarOffice was available. But I would call it more of a “WordPad” replacement than fully fledged Word clone.
It was good for basic tasks. As you mentioned capable as the Google one. And just a side point, Google does not train on corporate (Dasher / G Suite or whatever they call it today), or educational accounts. I have a family domain for privacy reasons.
(They might of course change this any time)
@sukru:
I don’t believe that for a second. Note I’m not saying you are lying; you’ve been told by Google that your family/education account is safe. But I absolutely don’t trust Google and I guarantee there is a loophole or clause hidden somewhere they are hiding behind when they inevitably are discovered to be slurping up everyone’s data. Their entire business model is built upon selling and monetizing user data; there is not a single product from them that is safe from their prying eyes. They were found to be scanning Gmail and Docs accounts and feeding it into Gemini and they claimed it was opt-in, but was found to actually be opt-out. Not a damn thing happened to them besides some negative press that was swept under the rug.
Morgan,
Well… I wrote many of those pipelines, so, I don’t know how else to tell you…
Hi, I’m one of the Collabora developer.
“It looks like Collabora fired the first shot, creating an offline (aka competitor to LibreOffice) version of Collabora.”
Not sure what you’re referring to here… the recent introduced Collabora Office, which is a local version of Collabora Online or the Collabora Office “Classics”, which is LibreOffice with different branding or the fact that as the result of this we moved to work on exclusively our repository?
“Add in the fact that Collabora is a for-profit company…”
Trying to make money and and pay FOSS developers to work on what they like is a bad thing I guess…
“…and you can see why The Document Foundation is suspicious that Collabora may withhold features for their own offline office suite (by diverging the codebases and refusing to port them to LibreOffice) or even pull an Android and start moving various bits and pieces to proprietary software (it’s not like most users will care, as the Android and Chrome experience has showed us).”
No idea what you’re talking about – TDF was never suspicions that we withhold any features and we have not done so with Collabora Online as well we won’t do so with anything going forward. Of course we won’t be working on the TDF repository anymore, but all our code is FOSS and available in our repository without any license change. There are no features we have withhold ever…
“Collabora owns too many cards here. That’s not a good situation…”
How is the fact that the doers own cards is a bad thing? At TDF the non-doers are holding all the cards – how is that a good thing?
See also : https://meeksfamily.uk/~michael/blog/2026-04-02-tdf-ejects-core-devs.html
Collabora Offline (aka Collabora Office) isn’t “LibreOffice with different branding”, it’s a different product that uses Chromium (or some other browser enging) to render the UI. This is Collabora (the company) building a competitor to LibreOffice on a different codebase, so they won’t need LibreOffice any more, so they can stop contributing back to LibreOffice.
I mean, The Document Foundation had no problem letting Collabora collect all that sweet SaaS revenue from Collabora Online*, all they wanted was for Collabora not to release a competitor to LibreOffice built on a different codebase, so that Collabora has to contribute back to LibreOffice. That was a fair exchange of value IMO considering all the LibreOffice codebase Collabora inherited from TDF, but apparently, Collabora is walking back from that.
*yes, I know you can technically run your own self-hosted instance of Collabora Online, but in practice, for most people who can’t set up a server, Collabora is a SaaS service.
(also, if I wanted an office suite that’s using a browser engine to render the UI, with all the memory and CPU inefficiency this entails, I’d go to OnlyOffice, but that’s another rant for another day)
You can “make money and pay FOSS developers” even if you are a non-profit, I am suspicious of Collabora just as I was with all other for-profit companies developing FOSS software (Google with Android, Hashicorp with Terraform etc) because a for-profit company is by law obligated to have the interests of shareholders or stakeholders as its first priority, not create FOSS software. Having a for-profit owning all the cards of what was the LibreOffice codebase is a setback from having a non-profit owning all the cards.
I hope LibreOffice launches LibreOffice Online soon so they can start collecting some SaaS revenue of their own so they can keep developing LibreOffice under non-profit motives, but let’s be real, this can take years to happen, and in the meantime, they have nothing, since even idealistic tech people of the 2010s tend to follow the money in the 2020s.
Quikee,
It is great to see your pragmatist point of view. Yes, being able to fund open source development in a sustainable way is important. And many discussions here inadvertently comes to that topic.
kurkosdr, I think you are looking from a more idealogical point of view, and see this as a kind of betrayal to ideals. That is probably true, this does not sound right from the outside (as someone who has not closely followed it)
But sometimes real life realities dictates what we can ideally do.
What are you saying? TDF abandoned Libreoffice online year ago while Collabora continued that work. Now TDF wants to resurrected that work while completely ignoring Collabora. That would put Collabora in a permanent forked position while a “clean”, “true” Libreoffice online existed. That is an obvious sabotage.
Well, I use the other OS office suite, Calligra from KDE. Serves my needs well.
As far as ONLYOFFICE goes, it’s a good product, definitely feels the most polished of all the options out there at the moment. So it makes sense to pick it as the basis for the European efforts, from a UX and potentially a technology standpoint. It is a shame, though, that they felt it necessary to rebrand/fork it just because its origins are Russian, and also that the licensing additions to the AGPL seem so complicated and contradictory. I’ll be curious to see what happens here, which I guess will ultimately be decided by the courts (as well as the court of public opinion).