The Board of Directors of The Document Foundation, which oversees the LibreOffice office suite, has approved the resumption of development of LibreOffice Online, a project that enables remote work with the office suite via the web. LibreOffice Online features a client-server architecture and can be used as an alternative to services such as Google Docs and Office 365. LibreOffice Core, which handles the layout and rendering of documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, runs on the server, while the interface rendering is performed on the frontend, running in the browser.
LibreOffice Online development at The Document Foundation was officially frozen in 2022, but repository contributions ceased in 2020 after the project's transformation into Collabora Online. In 2020, Collabora, a major contributor to LibreOffice Online, created a fork and continued development in its own repository under the Collabora Online brand. Collabora Online continued to develop as an open source project, and for rapid deployment on its own platforms. серверах A ready-made platform CODE (Collabora Online Development Edition) was offered.
It is alleged that the previous board members voted with a conflict of interest when deciding to suspend LibreOffice Online in 2022. The current board of directors of The Document Foundation acknowledged the changed situation and reversed the decision to suspend. The LibreOffice Online repository is planned to be opened for community contributions, but will have a warning about its status that will remain until it is confirmed secure and ready for use.
Michael Meeks, who works at Collabora and serves on the governing board of The Document Foundation, noted that speculation about download restrictions for Collabora Online is unfounded—the package remains freely available for download to anyone, and development of the entire codebase continues in a public repository with the participation of a large team of volunteers from the community.
During the fork, created to address branding and marketing issues, not only Collabora staff but also all LibreOffice Online developers from the community switched to the new repository. After two years of forking, no one was willing to continue maintaining the old LibreOffice Online repository, so it was frozen. The community around Collabora Online functions in the style of Fedora and openSUSE, its processes are open and transparent, and contributions from third-party contributors are valued.
The Document Foundation, for its part, is attempting to assert control over the product through its brand and independently decide where to direct interested users. This had already happened before the fork—the LibreOffice Online page, instead of Collabor, promoted products from other companies that contributed almost nothing to the development.
Michael views resuming development of the old LibreOffice Online codebase as pointless, as the primary development has long been taking place in the Collabora Online repository, and it's unlikely that existing contributors will switch to the LibreOffice Online repository. Recreating the LibreOffice Online repository as a fork of the current Collabora Online repository, while rebranding all Collabora work, is perceived as vandalism against the project, which could lead to serious negative consequences for both LibreOffice and Collabora. Michael proposes maintaining the status quo established five years ago, where credit is reasonably distributed between the two projects.
Ninety-five percent of the code specific to Collabora Online is contributed by Collabora and its partners. In 2025, Collabora contributed 45% of all changes to LibreOffice. In preparation for the release of LibreOffice 26.2, support for Markdown, the majority of changes to Writer, Chart, and Impress, as well as half of the changes to the user interface and Calc were contributed by Collabora. However, unlike previous press releases, this year The Document Foundation didn't even mention Collabora in the announcement of LibreOffice 26.2.
Source: opennet.ru
