This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
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
The Document Foundation's official reply came from Italo Vignoli, a founder Collabora lists as having already exited TDF membership.
He has kept it short, confirming that the removals happened, pointing to TDF's recently adopted Community Bylaws as the basis. Those bylaws include a clause requiring anyone affiliated with a company in an active legal dispute with TDF to step down from membership.
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
Members involved in legal claims for endangering the Foundation, eg. by means of putting the charitable status at risk, or misusing TDF’s funds, or by damaging any of TDF’s assets, or by attempting to do any of these must relinquish their membership by means of notification to the MC. If the legal claim, in relation to the mentioned matters, involves a company/organisation then also their affiliated members must relinquish their membership.
Back to the original linked article:
The stated rationale is that past situations saw people put their employer's interests ahead of the foundation's, and the clause exists to stop that happening again. The specifics of the legal dispute between TDF and Collabora are not mentioned by either party.
TDF also makes clear that a membership revocation is not a ban from contributing, with the project remaining open to anyone, and expects Collabora to keep contributing "when the time comes."
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
