As a person who refuses to use “free” cloud products, and won’t even consider Office on Windows, I’m a big fan of LibreOffice. I’ve donated a few times over the years but probably not enough.

I’ll be sad if there’s not a free & local “office” solution available.

That said, my eyes crossed trying to read this. Do I need to ask an LLM to read the various messages and tell me what’s going on? ;-)

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fhdkweig 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If LibreOffice ceases to exist, won't the old installers still work? Is it forkable to a new project? I seem to remember that it was Star Office then Open Office then LibreOffice.

	▲	kackerlacker 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I think such situations are rather big risk that a community that already wasn't very active atrophies or splits and then atrophies. With code bases like that there's also a lot of maintenance so being able to run an old version is not necessarily enough.

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godot 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't know about any of the drama happening, but if LibreOffice ceases to exist, there's still Softmaker FreeOffice as a free & local option. It's nothing fancy, but works for the times when I have to use one. I'm not against cloud products as you are, but it's nice being able to do stuff locally sometimes, it's just more convenient.

	▲	deafpolygon 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If LO ceases to exist, then I will just use plain text typesetting tools.

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tomrod 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Before Libre Office was Open Office.

I take comfort that we would not be without a local office suite for long.

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bityard 10 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

There is still Open Office: https://www.openoffice.org

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SV_BubbleTime an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I’d love for someone to be able to take it from “yeah it mostly works for me” to “oh fuck you Microsoft, I’m going to move our entire company over to this”.

I’m not going to hold my breath.

	▲	redeeman 32 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		because thats not about quality, its about "i demand something thats 100% exactly the same as microsofts product, even in the places where its objectively crappier. I also wish it to track the microslop so that it consistently stays as shitty as microslop deems, so that I may never realize I use something else."

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shevy-java 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I’ll be sad if there’s not a free & local “office” solution available.

I think a free open source suite will always exist. But probably slow down if existing open source solutions handicap progress for whatever the reason(s).

They should focus on making the office suite much more useful and powerful and wide-spread. Like ffmpg+mpv!