One of the brains behind Collabora Online, Michael Meeks talks to us about taking open source office to the cloud and document liberation.

T rain-hopping at 5am one damp British March morning, Linux Format headed from the gloomy south-west of England to that centre of UK educational excellence that’s also dubbed the Silicon Fen – due to the number of tech startups it’s birthed – Cambridge. To be specific, the destination for this trip was Clare College, the second-oldest of Cambridge’s 31 colleges, just a short bus ride from the city centre.

It was here that Collabora was holding its COOL Days 2023 conference (you can read a report on that in LXF302), and while we were attending, we took the opportunity to catch up with managing director, ex-Novell developer, ex-OpenOffice contributor and, most importantly, ex-Linux Format columnist Michael Meeks, so he could explain what the heck document liberation is and why the EU is embracing Collabora Online like its life depended on it!

Linux Format: When Linux Format last spoke with you (Interview, LXF156), you were still working at Novell on OpenOffice and you didn’t have grey hair!

Michael Meeks: That’s what running a company can do! This was a while ago – 11 years? I don’t know whether we’ve told the story of that. SUSE looked across its portfolio and what people were working on, and decided that people hacking versions of LibreOffice on to Android probably wasn’t core to its server business.

I think it’s just a symptom of good management, after many years of indulging that passion for open source. SUSE focused on the wider desktop and on things that made it money, which is fantastic as a business strategy, but better than that, it just dealt with us in a really good way. It allowed us to spin out (to Collabora) and gave us a contract to support SUSE’s customer needs, which continues to this day.

It let us take, I think, seven of the staff from SUSE to form the nucleus of that startup and so we gambled; we mortgaged the houses and that sort of thing to pay people.

We proceeded with that and managed to persuade six people to join us: “Why don’t you get employed by a company with no income, no revenue!” Luckily, Collabora, the parent company, provided some guarantees and some really useful structure around that, and we formed Collabora Productivity 10 years ago. Now we’re 45 or so people and that’s quite some growth. We still have five of those original seven with us. So that’s encouraging, 10 years on!