Summary
The FOSS community vote revived LibreOffice Online development, nullifying the previous 2022 freeze.
TDF will reopen the repo for contributions, issue a stability warning, and call for community help.
TDF won’t host servers; they’ll release self-hostable tools – great news if you love a DIY cloud.
One thing I really love about FOSS is its focus on community. Because they don’t have a profit margin to maintain, the community can care less about shareholders and making money, and instead focus on making a great product. And part of that community spirit includes people coming together to vote on things.
For example, back in 2022, The Document Foundation (TDF) voted on putting the work on LibreOffice Online on hold. However, a vote has passed that revokes the resolution of the original poll, which means that LibreOffice Online is back under construction.
Related
5 reasons Collabora is the best self-hosted Google Workspace alternative
Better privacy, better compatibility
Work on LibreOffice Online resumes as the world begins demanding software sovereignty
Hopefully it’ll be a hit
As spotted by Linuxiac, there’s a new announcement on The Document Foundation’s website. Titled “LibreOffice Online: a fresh start,” it announces that it has resumed work after the community voted to freeze progress back in 2022. At the time, the community was feeling uneasy about an online version of LibreOffice. It would compete with Collabora Online, owned by one of LibreOffice’s bigger contributors. It also had concerns about maintaining an official cloud service and the money it’d take.
Well, the TDF found a way to make some changes and keep everyone happy. In a thread, the Board of Directors took to the digital polling station to vote on whether the TDF should nullify the 2022 votes to freeze development, with the vote passing. So, LibreOffice Online is officially underway once more:
Now the work begins. We plan to reopen the repository for LibreOffice Online at The Document Foundation for contributions, but provide warnings about the state of the repository until TDF’s team agrees that it’s safe and usable – while at the same time encourage the community to join in with code, technologies and other contributions that can be used to move forward. We will actively work with the community to identify how to foster LibreOffice Online, including its technological basis, QA and marketing.
So, what was the magic bullet TDF discovered that both prevented it from muscling in on Collabora and saved itself from needing to host servers at the same time? Simple: TDF announced that it won’t host the servers at all. It will give you the tools to host it yourself, but it won’t do it for you. This is either great news or awful news, depending on how much you enjoy self-hosting stuff or not. Personally, I’m stoked.