GRASSY KNOWLES
Jan Wildeboer 😷
Some folks at Microsoft and Google (and maybe even the new EuroOffice people) are very happy about all the infighting in the LibreOffice/TDF/Collabora community, I guess. Le sigh.
Now I have my own (long) history with the document foundation and I am 100% sure that they are on the right side. But based on the info I have, they felt like they were forced to do what they did. This whole escalation comes at the worst possible time. But nothing I can do. In my personal opinion, the Open Document Format and its ecosystem is THE chance for #DigitalSovereignty, not only for Europe.
John Ulrik@jwildeboer I wish they stopped the infighting. They‘re not enemies. Last time I checked there was this … other office suite, 3-something or so, currently being enslopified … if you have energy to fight, fight that!
Bjoern Michaelsen@jwildeboer
The original sin was the public perception that TDF was controlling the development of #LibreOffice. It never was and as a German NGO mostly cannot even do that in the way its users expect. The deadly follow up mistake was trying to directly hire devs: it doesnt scale and the foundation has no competent leadership to direct them anyway.
Instead TDF should have invested in diversifing LibreOffice dev contributor base with volunteers or other parties to replace the diversity once SuSE/RedHat/Canonical disinvested and the core devs were more and more monopolized. It failed to do so out of foolish anti "developer" sentiment.
@Sweetshark That's your opinion that I absolutely respect. It's not my opinion, though. It's destructive infighting, fuelled not just by one side. There is also a lot of ego involved and this escalation was ultimately unavoidable, mostly due to that. That's my opinion, that I hope you also respect.
@jwildeboer
I agree - also on the point that there is ego and ... difficult personalities on both sides. But there is also a structual issue beyond the egos that goes back longer than LibreOffice itself: the problematic understanding of #opensource as "free as in beer" and of LibreOffice as a product and not as a project/community. The latter would have broken this at some point even without toxic personalities.
I agree - also on the point that there is ego and ... difficult personalities on both sides. But there is also a structual issue beyond the egos that goes back longer than LibreOffice itself: the problematic understanding of #opensource as "free as in beer" and of LibreOffice as a product and not as a project/community. The latter would have broken this at some point even without toxic personalities.
@Sweetshark I always cared more about the ODF as a standard and less about the implementations. ODF being implemented in many places and in interoperable ways is what I always hoped for. And that can and should still be done.
@jwildeboer … nobody is fightng over LyX ? LaTeX is still my favourite markup lingua franca.
Ryek DarkenerHumans are humans everywhere. Nevertheless up to now the better solution prevailed over time. As the alternative would mean we could not talk today.
Gives me hope.
John Carlsen 🇺🇸🇳🇱🇪🇺What's going on with the people behind LibreOffice etc?
I haven't kept up enough since it forked from Sun's OpenOffice after Oracle bought Sun.
å®®åŸŽå·´æƒ @jwildeboer I would suggest checking out this article on the situation. This whole infighting seems to be a problem of TDF’s own making.
LibreOffice am Abgrund: Wie die Document Foundation ihre eigenen Gründer vor die Tür setzte - Linux Guides Community
LibreOffice steckt in der schwersten Krise seit seiner Gründung. Die Document Foundation hat im April 2026 über 30 Kernentwickler aus ihren Gremien ausgeschlossen - darunter die Leute, die fast die Hälfte des gesamten Codes geschrieben haben. Der Trick: Erst verklagt man den Partner, dann schliesst man seine Mitarbeiter mit Verweis auf die laufende Klage aus. Collabora, das Unternehmen hinter den ausgeschlossenen Entwicklern, schlägt mit einem eigenen Desktop-Produkt zurück, das technologisch einen klaren Bruch mit dem alten LibreOffice darstellt. Droht LibreOffice das gleiche Schicksal wie Apache OpenOffice? Eine Analyse der Eskalationsspirale - vom gescheiterten Branding-Experiment 2020 über den Krieg um die Cloud bis zum endgültigen Bruch im April 2026.
@KitsuneofInari And I would suggest adding the other side too: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/04/05/lets-put-an-end-to-the-speculation/ and https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/04/01/comment-about-collabora-blog-post/
Let's put an end to the speculation - TDF Community Blog
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. At the time, nobody could imagine that the companies that had supported OpenOffice.org until then would create a project to kill LibreOffice. Also, if the project were to be successful, it would require resources greater than those available, and above all, a deep management experience. Fortunately, the project grew quite rapidly. However, the founders’ different backgrounds and opinions were at the same time the reason for some bold decisions – many of which right – as well as a few mistakes, which are the root cause of some of the current
Bruce Simpson, Ph.D.@jwildeboer This is... not good. I have an item to evaluate Collabora soon.