The Board of Directors of The Document Foundation, which oversees the LibreOffice office suite, has approved the resumption of the LibreOffice Online project, enabling remote work with the office suite through the web. LibreOffice Online has a client-server architecture and can be used as an alternative to services like Google Docs and Office 365 ā the LibreOffice Core runs on the server, responsible for the composition and rendering of documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, while the interface rendering is done on the frontend, operating in the browser.
The development of LibreOffice Online at The Document Foundation was officially frozen in 2022, but changes to the repository ceased in 2020 after the project was transformed into Collabora Online. In 2020, the company Collabora, which contributed significantly to the development of LibreOffice Online, created a fork and continued development in its own repository under the Collabora Online brand. Collabora Online continued to evolve as an open project, and for rapid deployment on its servers a ready-made platform CODE (Collabora Online Development Edition) was offered.
It is alleged that when deciding to freeze LibreOffice Online in 2022, former board members voted under conditions of a conflict of interest. The current Board of Directors of The Document Foundation has recognized that the situation has changed and has rescinded the freeze decision. The LibreOffice Online repository is planned to be opened for community contributions, but will include a warning about its status, which will remain until security and readiness for use are confirmed.
Michael Meeks, who works at Collabora and is a member of the governing board of The Document Foundation, noted that speculation about restricting downloads of Collabora Online is unfoundedā the package remains available for free download to anyone interested, and development of the entire codebase continues in a public repository with the involvement of a large team of community volunteers.
At the time of the fork created to address branding and marketing issues, not only Collabora employees but all developers of LibreOffice Online from the community switched to the new repository. After the fork was created, there were no willing participants to continue supporting the old LibreOffice Online repository for two years, which led to its freezing. The community formed around Collabora Online operates in the style of Fedora and openSUSE, with open and transparent processes where contributions from external participants are valued.
The Document Foundation is trying to gain control over the product through its brand and independently decide where to direct interested users. This had already happened before the creation of the fork ā on the LibreOffice Online page, products from other companies were promoted instead of Collabora, which contributed little to the development.
Michael considers the resumption of development on the old LibreOffice Online codebase a pointless step, as the main development has long been underway in the Collabora Online repository, and it is unlikely that existing participants will switch to the LibreOffice Online repository. Recreating the LibreOffice Online repository as a fork of the current Collabora Online repository while rebranding all of Collabora's work is viewed as vandalism towards the project, which could lead to serious negative consequences for both LibreOffice and Collabora. Michael suggests maintaining the status quo established five years ago, where recognition of contributions is fairly distributed between the two projects.
The code specific to Collabora Online is 95% comprised of contributions from Collabora and its partners. In 2025, Collabora employees accounted for 45% of all changes in LibreOffice. In preparing the release of LibreOffice 26.2, support for the Markdown format, most changes in Writer, Chart and Impress, as well as half of the changes in the user interface and Calc were prepared by Collabora, while this year the Document Foundation did not even mention Collabora in the announcement of LibreOffice 26.2, unlike past press releases.
Source: opennet.ru
