“We won’t get any closer to the goal if we don’t start.”
such a great line, yes, just take a step! Even if it’s hard, you will learn something but if you don’t try, you won’t.
Article says they also switch to Linux, which is kind of an even bigger deal!
Good to see. LibreOffice is solid today. Was passable back in like 2012. Now it’s pretty excellent, at least for most people. Ribbon interface like 5 years ago was pretty rough. Now I think it’s pretty close to great. I thought OnlyOffice and WPS Office had a substantial visual edge but that was me comparing it to like 2020 LibreOffice. 2025 LibreOffice looks pretty good now that I wouldn’t feel worries about newcomers looking at it as a relic of 2003 visual design
Hopefully this also means monetary investment in open source, not just open source usage without a support contract or contributing back. Matrix is a great example of an open source project that is being used by governments but struggling to get paid because governments are employing their own support staff and making internal forks.
But the more governments, agencies and individuals switch, there greater the chance they’ll pay the developers and maintainers for support or features.
Is it even legal?
I wonder why they chose LibreOffice instead of Collabora?
IIRC, Collabora is based off of LibreOffice.
Yes it is… but it actually allows for collab features that LibreOffice doesn’t have.
Like what?
If Collabora has extra features they do not think they need, relying on the lowest dependencies seems like the most reliable and fair choice.
LibreOffice is offline; each person can run the software in their own device to create and edit documents.
It’s features are equivalent to 2010 Office. That’s not necessarily bad, but it’s not how people usually work today.
Collabora lets you host documents on a central server and have multiple people edit at once, dynamically tracking changes and allowing full revision management. Or, you can keep your documents local and not host them if you don’t want to.
I think you are thinking of Collabora Online, not Collabora Office and surely not Collabora the company.
Maybe they’ve been watching Schleswig Holstein in Germany and they do it better than we do.
Collabora is a online frontend for LibreOffice.
