Collabora clearly has a conflict of interest, as their Collabora Office products both benefit from, and compete with LibreOffice proper. They even allude to that conflict of interest in the next sentence:

> overriding past board and engineering steering committee decisions and violating their own processes to drag code out of the attic to enable competing with their largest single contributor

A non-profit dedicated to promoting open source software should do what is best for that project and its users regardless of if doing so steps on the toes of corporate sponsors.

https://community.documentfoundation.org/t/well-known-high-c...

Also found this in the annual report, sounds quite serious:

> In 2023, following a request by the Foundation Authorities in Berlin, given the size our foundation has grown into over the last decade, TDF was audited, and a report was sent back to Berlin. The Board of Directors is working with the authorities to implement the improvements suggested by the audit

https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/fsqeJZrAtXeR7JD?d...

Would be helpful if the blog post was more clear about this

Some founders/directors kept using money from the foundation to pay their own private companies to get work done.

This is highly irregular: you can’t manage funds that aren’t yours and use those funds to buy from a company which gives you profit.

Legal council warned the of this irregularity, and nothing was made to change the status quo during years.

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!

I take comfort that we would not be without a local office suite for long.

It is the only non cloud free office solution which is truely free. How can this be irrelevant?

Office documents are still fundamentally opaque to data extraction and generation. The user interfaces of the components are still heavily restricted to dedicated applications as opposed to providing some sort of means of embedding them in other contexts such as gasp a web page that might have an actually good Excel interface.

And I would say in general llm should be a massive boon to closing the compatibility gap between free office applications and the barriers put up by proprietary ones, particularly format. Parsing and saving

If we can have an office document foundation similar to what Labor office does to provide generalized libraries and code for parsing office document formats saving them across many platforms, something that just piecemeal across most programming languages and environments, it could be a huge boon to open days formats represented by these relatively important file formats:

The spreadsheet

The word document

The presentation

The flowchart/chart

Well, Microsoft with things like OLE kind of pushed some of these capabilities across the Microsoft ecosystem. That sucks and it failed because it was within the Monopoly.

But the vision was a good one.