Reading TDF's "side" of the story gives me firm confidence that Collabora was in fact in the right, here. Collabora seems to have the facts on their side, which is why TDF's account here is so vague and passive-aggressive and filled with FUD.
I read it, and was hoping I would be more sympathetic to their side, but it was essentially 'they violated the rules our newly added non-contributor board members set, and by those rules, we kicked them out'.
Essentially this 100% confirms the Collabora story, just elaborates a bit on how the administrative takeover was done.
Not just this, it the way the vote was announced seems very, very bad. Italo may have found legal issues, but one of the things he said was that legal action was being taken by Collabora. That… doesn’t seem to be the case.
Italo and co removed some very dedicated contributors from the TDF. What an absolute disaster.
Love LibreOffice development? Want to turn your passion into a paid job? We are The Document Foundation (TDF), the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice. We’re passionate about free software, the open source culture and about bringing new companies and people with fresh ideas into our community.
To improve the user interface of LibreOffice, the office productivity suite for over 200 million users around the globe, we’re searching for a developer (m/f/d) to start work (from home) as soon as possible. This is what you’ll do:
* Work on the LibreOffice codebase (mostly C++)
* Focus on LibreOffice’s user interface, in the way it is rendered and laid out
* Fix bugs, implement new features, and improve the quality of the UI code in LibreOffice while working together with the design team and other contributors
* Document what you do, actively share knowledge in public with volunteers and contributors via blog posts, workshops and conference talks, so other developers and users have an easier time learning about your work
Here's also the Apache Software Foundation's Security Team minutes with "openoffice (Health amber): Three issues in OpenOffice over 365 days old and a number of other open issues not fully triaged":
It's extremely risky to keep using OpenOffice. Apache has marked its security status as "Amber" with "three issues in OpenOffice over 365 days old and a number of other open issues not fully triaged."
It's also worrying that The Apache Foundation continues to promote and distribute OpenOffice despite unfixed security issues and zero updates to the software. So many people in the FOSS world have called on them to finally retire it, put it in the Attic and keep up a good reputation for FOSS - but they won't do it. It still gets hundreds of thousands of downloads despite being unfixed.
BTW, anyone concerned can email apache at apache dot org and ask why they're still distributing OpenOffice despite vulnerabilities. A few people on Mastodon have done that but gotten no answers yet. The more pressure there is to put it in the Attic, the sooner this awful situation will end...
Yes, and now there are unfixed security issues in OpenOffice over a year old, so the ASF really, really should put it in the Attic ASAP. If more people in the FOSS world raise awareness about this, perhaps it will finally happen, so users become aware of maintained, fixed successor projects:
> In that way, you can get long-term Service Level Agreements (SLA), personalised assistance, technical support, and custom new features.
Thanks, but not quite what I'm looking for. I want a fully maintained and supported offline word processor and spreadsheet for Linux, much as Windows/OSX has Microsoft Office.
If I felt that LibreOffice was maintained and supported, I would not be asking.
I'm very confused about what you are asking, exactly. In your first post, you ask for "a supported version of LibreOffice that I can pay for", when it's pointed out to you that you can, it's not actually LibreOffice that you want to pay for, because you insinuate it's not maintained and supported?
Even though the paid offer includes technical support and a simple git log shows 50 commits in the past 24 hours in the core repository?
We have different definitions of "supported and maintained". My definition means that it doesn't crash, and that it opens my clients' documents without mangling them. I have absolutely no interest in how many lines of code went into a source code repo in any time period, and I don't want one-to-one technical assistance.
Typically old binary; unfortunately these are the documents which clients' accounting and legal departments tend to send me. OOXML is better, though not always identical to the Word rendering. Spreadsheets, in fairness, tend to do pretty well.
Bug reports: no. I do participate in open source projects, but I really just want to pay someone else for an office suite.
You could probably pay for someone to fix the few rendering/incompatible issues with those old binary formats as a patch. Any paid solution would likely have similar issues, so paying for the functionally you want/need directly is likely the only alternative to just using Word directly, and you could give back to the community in a big way if that's something you value. It might cost as little as $200 or so.
The problem is I think so few people care about those old binary formats these days, so there probably isn't much demand to improve compatibility for the edge cases you are encountering.
Yeah, as I understand it you have to buy it to get the supported version.
Not sure why they don't have an online store or something and you have to contact them to purchase it though, that seems to add unnecessary friction for someone who just wants a single license (makes more sense for enterprise users).
You can buy the Mac and Windows version online for a small fee. I guess interest in a "boxed" Linux version is low enough they don't make it easy to buy a single license.
The Apache Security Team report says it now has "three issues in OpenOffice over 365 days old and a number of other open issues not fully triaged". So it's not just unmaintained, but actively putting users at risk. It's not clear why the ASF won't put it in the Attic.
The "NotebookBar" tabbed user interface is a huge change and was implemented a few years ago. Still needs some refinement (anyone is welcome to help the Design community volunteers!) but there have been some very big changes...
