Finding equi-Libre-um IN-DEPTH

Your favourite office suite needs help, as Jonni Bidwell finds out…

CREDIT: Getty

Upon hearing the words “office suite for Linux” there’s a good chance you’d think immediately of LibreOffice. Yes there are others, but LibreOffice (with a couple of exceptions) has for many years been the de facto standard for wrangling documents on Linux.

Not only that, but The Open Document formats have become so widespread that businesses and even the UK government uses them. The applications may been mocked for looking like Word, Excel and PowerPoint from the late 90s, but there’s no denying they’re a powerhouse of productivity. Also, we never liked Microsoft’s ‘modern’ ribbon interface…

But have you ever stopped to think how this huge project is maintained and sustained? Perhaps you’ve heard of The Document Foundation, perhaps not. For years this has been lobbying and advocating for digital equality and document sovereignty since its establishment in 2010. Through libre productivity software, interoperability, good documentation and translations for as many languages as possible, the independent non-profit meritocracy aims to make the world a better place.

Most big projects have the backing of some sort of foundation, and it’s generally inferred that foundations provide support not only in the shape of governance, but also materially, in the form of cold, hard cash. For LibreOffice though, this isn’t quite true. Today, a great deal of LibreOffice development is done by open source champions Collabora, the UK-Canada consultancy that’s contributed extensively to projects as diverse as Chromium, Wayland and SteamOS. And to pay their bills they’ve created Collabora Office, a supported, enterprise edition of LibreOffice.

Increasingly, enterprises are switching to online office suites (even Future Towers, who deny all those without a permit to save their documents locally), and Collabora has developed one of those, too. We chatted with Collabora’s Michael Meeks (general manager for productivity) and Simon Lofthouse (marketing lead) to get the lowdown on Collabora Online, the LibreOffice funding gap, and The Document Foundation’s secret slush fund.

A new office opening

The year 2010 was a wild time in the world of open source. Oracle had just acquired Sun Microsystems, which caused users of their Solaris operating system to fork the project and create OpenSolaris, over fears Oracle that would shelve the project. Sun, you will remember, also created OpenOffice.organd there were fears that project was in jeopardy, too.

So in 2010 LibreOffice was forked from the OpenOffice.orgcodebase, and in order to promote and manage it, The Document Foundation (TDF) was announced. Two years later TDF was legally established as a non-profit.

But what about the coding? The project is far too big to rely on volunteers (although they still contribute a great deal, such as the 120 odd translations for LibreOffice 7.3). And where exactly does The Document Foundation fit in? We asked Michael, who explains: “LibreOffice development is a highly successful and collaborative endeavour. The Document Foundation (TDF) was set up to be a vendor-neutral entity to help people work together.