Comment by allenrb
7 hours ago
As a person who refuses to use “free” cloud products, and won’t even consider Office on Windows, I’m a big fan of LibreOffice. I’ve donated a few times over the years but probably not enough.
I’ll be sad if there’s not a free & local “office” solution available.
That said, my eyes crossed trying to read this. Do I need to ask an LLM to read the various messages and tell me what’s going on? ;-)
If LibreOffice ceases to exist, won't the old installers still work? Is it forkable to a new project? I seem to remember that it was Star Office then Open Office then LibreOffice.
I think such situations are rather big risk that a community that already wasn't very active atrophies or splits and then atrophies. With code bases like that there's also a lot of maintenance so being able to run an old version is not necessarily enough.
Yeah that ability to use old code is great as an emergency escape hatch but it's not really a viable day-to-day document editing strategy.
What maintenance are you talking about? I'm quite sure I could open any document on my computer with a libreoffice version from ten years ago. The functionality doesn't magically rot away...
The questionnis: How does a community form, which can take a project tof that size? TDF andjvre Office cMd out of a long process of independent (from Sun Microsystems) contributions to OpenOffice, which at some point had a momentum to do a proper form and then another momentum to take over as the lead variant.
For a successful fork you need a notable amount of people engaging in the fork.
I don't know about any of the drama happening, but if LibreOffice ceases to exist, there's still Softmaker FreeOffice as a free & local option. It's nothing fancy, but works for the times when I have to use one. I'm not against cloud products as you are, but it's nice being able to do stuff locally sometimes, it's just more convenient.
OnlyOffice and its upcoming Euro Office derivative, which I already like better than LibreOffice.
Apparently Euro-Office has some drama around it too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47100599) but in general I think they're in the right here - you can't just ignore parts of a software license selectively because you feel like it. Oh and I liked their software when I did try it out, except LibreOffice seems like a slightly safer bet (though I'm also not as sensitive to the way its UI is).
If LO ceases to exist, then I will just use plain text typesetting tools.
There are many good options for text editing, some for presentations, but what about spreadsheets? Using Python/R/SQL everywhere ain't no panacea, spreadsheets are really useful in some cases and LO has the best implementation I've seen apart from Excel.
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Before Libre Office was Open Office.
I take comfort that we would not be without a local office suite for long.
I’d love for someone to be able to take it from “yeah it mostly works for me” to “oh fuck you Microsoft, I’m going to move our entire company over to this”.
I’m not going to hold my breath.
Boggles the mind that corporates stick to expensive, inefficient, insecure and in so many ways crap software. SQL Sever, Office, Oracle (any product), Windows servers and workstations - yet demand peak efficiency from staff.
because thats not about quality, its about "i demand something thats 100% exactly the same as microsofts product, even in the places where its objectively crappier. I also wish it to track the microslop so that it consistently stays as shitty as microslop deems, so that I may never realize I use something else."
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There is still Open Office: https://www.openoffice.org
Well, it exists but got one patch release (fixing 7 CVEs and little more) in 2025, no release in 2024, two patch releases in 2023. Not a really active project. Also most of the community moved on.
Apache OOo is dumped by Oracle and since then didn't receive much love.
> I’ll be sad if there’s not a free & local “office” solution available.
I think a free open source suite will always exist. But probably slow down if existing open source solutions handicap progress for whatever the reason(s).
They should focus on making the office suite much more useful and powerful and wide-spread. Like ffmpg+mpv!