Why don’t they contribute to LibreOffice Online?
this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2026
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Because the Only Office source is more modern while Libre Offices's source code now is around 35 years old. At least that was the reasoning in one of the articles I read.
So old code is now suddenly bad? Weird and somewhat also not the case, as LibreOffice is constantly updated.
I guess it is a preference. I for myself tend to rather use a FreeBSD than Fedora for production environments.
Sometimes it is better to start fresh.
Especially when you want to be the owner of something.
Libre has 35 years of good, bad, and the ugly. It's has 35 years of tech debt, and design choices made. That's not easy to just "fix"
It's a completely different beast to sift through legacy code than it is to just start fresh.
Not getting rid of the old is one of the many reason Windows is such a shit show. Every program today in 2026 asks itself "Am I Barbie Riding Club(1996)? Before it runs because it needs a special compatibility mode". Why inherit among the million other issues if you don't want to?
Bet they are not starting fresh. Instead of using 35 year old code base they are using 20 year old code base.
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Old isn't necessarily bad, unless years of decision-making have left it in a massively complex state (see also: Xorg)
The real reason here is that LibreOffice is written in C++, which is falling rapidly out of fashion for modern apps, leading to a smaller supply of developers.
Contrast this with Onlyoffice. Yes, the document engine is still written in C++, however the build tools use more modern items like python and onlyoffice supports having Javascript frontends and scripting, making it easier to source web devs to work on these parts.
I am not sure if this is the real reason. C++ is still a very valid option. People used to low level languages can rather easy switch the language they are writing in.
Maybe one day we will find out the real reason.
Technical debt is a thing. Everyone says Xorg is too old to be maintained so we have to switch to Wayland for example. I don't know the state of Libre Office but it's possible it simply can't be easily migrated to newer, better tools.
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Libre is rooted a bit in 90s design, with an OO object model designed to roughly mirror Microsoft 's COM/DCOM. I'm sure Libre has seen a lot of modernization - and I want that codebase to survive. But it's also nice to have a second option, now.
So old code is now suddenly bad?
Yes. It must go stale without some kind of needless churn; right?
I loved solving a problem that redhat cant fix (because the smart people left) on their theForeman clone with a workaround that I learned from the days of NIS+. A 30-year-old workaround for last year's shitty install.
But fear of established, known-good code will certainly change that in the long run: ifconfig, netstat, ifup, fstab, xinet, service; the more we can churn out the working tools for neu dreck coded by dunning-kruger lost-boys kids who had no mentoring to prevent dumb patterns, the less the working solutions for known-good tools will work. And that's, some how, "progress".
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That was my thought and Nextcloud already supports Collabora Office which is a fork of LibreOffice Online I believe.
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Honestly this stinks of potential enshitification downstream. Libreoffice and Openoffice are just fine. Nextcloud's posture in the market and "Brand name feel" sets of my alarm that it is like 5 minutes away from charging people subscriptions for self-hosting if they don't already. Synology runner up?
Nextcloud's business model is service contracts. Which is going great. The origin story of Nextcloud is that ownCloud was too commercial (open core) instead of fully open source, so they forked it. I haven't seen any moves by Nextcloud that has moved their focus from open source to hint at enshitification. Your claims are rather bold and without proof. Nextcloud doesn't even use LibreOffice, but the online derivative Collabora. Also OpenOffice has been dead for more than a decade so I don't know why you even reference that. Are you confusing this with the totally different OnlyOffice ('only' not 'open') which this news is actually about?
Their fork of OnlyOffice is actually because it is open core and they want it fully open source: https://github.com/Euro-Office/#euro-office-liberates-the-onlyoffice-code-base
Good podcast episode interviewing Frank Kolichek were the folk is mentioned : https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/2026-02-nextcloud-frank-karlitschek/
I haven’t made any claims. My comment is about the “vibes” of NextCloud as a “product” and “company”, if you want objectivity in what i’m saying.
Im not a nextcloud user and it’s good that you personally don’t feel that they’ve made any moves towards enshitification but we’ve seen countless companies start with great and pure intentions that unfortunately throw that all out the window when: an opportunity to be a market leader, opportunity of profits becomes too great, or the userbase becomes significant enough. “Open Source” seems to unfortunately be part of the tech company corporate playbook.
We live in a world where organizations and companies get to change terms after sale now. While it is not zero sum, if you’re not exercising skepticism towards those trying to offer you something, you’re probably doing yourself a disservice. Nothing is truly free.
Also, OpenOffice is definitely not dead lol https://www.openoffice.org/
Nextcloud is free software (aGPL v3) though so your worries are very misleading.
This project is not "Nextcloud" only. There are eight vendors competing on Nextcloud also contributing.
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Sounds good to me! I hope they support the open document formats better than onlyoffice currently does. Also euro-office isn't a particularly good name, although it has the advantage of being explicit about where it's based.
It looks like a well deserved middle finger to the US.
I would suggest FreedomOffice.
It's like "freedom fries", but with actual freedom.
Maybe liberation office, or just LibreOffice for short.
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They need to come up with a less cringe name than EuroOffice if they want any adoption. Not going to replace nationalism with pan-European nationalism.
If the point of this fork is software for European government use, I think the name is right on the nose.
I doubt EuroOffice needs widespread adoption, honestly. If I understand it right, the project isn't creating new document formats. They're just creating new software to read and edit existing formats. Like with email, where there are a thousand different email apps and providers, but they're all compatible, they can all send mail to one another, because they all use the same email protocol.
And if you don't like how one email app is managed you can move to another. Just like the EU doesn't like how Microsoft and Google will delete their politicians' accounts on Donald Trump's orders, so they're moving to another.
And governments outside the EU can and should build their own open source software and apps so they can control their own software independently of the big multinational (which we now know means American) tech firms.
I mean to say, I wouldn't want China or India or Indonesia or Brazil to use EuroOffice. I'd want them to build their own document apps, so that their governments' work can be controlled by their governments and not by potentially hostile foreign political or corporate powers.
Let a thousand flowers bloom, right?
Nice. Public beta: https://github.com/Euro-Office/
Interesting, it is a fork of Onlyoffice.
Yup, with the few closed source parts rewritten in OSS, and a full audit conducted. Guessing they chose it since it is more modern than Libre and web-native.
Are there any real, actually good replacements for Excel? As a daily power user, every alternative I've tried to date pales in comparison. I can't see anyone in my industry switching away from MS because of this, as things currently stand.
I hear this argument a lot but no one ever gives details as to what common features excel has vs say libreoffice. I'm really curious, because i'd like to contribute free time in this direction.
What I always find missing in all these Excel vs. other spreadsheet software debates is the rationale for using a spreadsheet in the first place. I work a lot with large corporations, and it’s often the case that they can’t move away from Excel because, in the past, they relied on it to solve a process in a way that—at least today—could and should be handled better. Perhaps we should question the process more often and the Excel alternatives less.
exactly this. Spreadsheets are so simple to understand that people think and communicate in spreadsheets. Managers don't understand how much they fucking love them. Its like a cult. They make everybody meet 5 times a week to look at various spreadsheets together. And don't see how ineffective they often are.
"we have a problem? Ok lets make a spreadsheet! Oh, the problem wasn't solved yet? Ok then look at the spreadsheet every week now!"
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Years ago, one of my buddies tried to open a very long spreadsheet and Libreoffice couldn't do it. I think the maximum row and columns reached parity in version 7. I think one more cosmetic feature that is missing is the easy to access table and chart style templates.
Its almost always that they've been following specific workflows or processes for the last n years and find that particular workflow isn't directly supported in LO.
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May I suggest Python ?
By the time you get tits deep in Excel to the point where other spreadsheets can't hack it, you may as well be using a real programming language instead of VBA...
If you can do advanced Excel, you can do Python (and numpy will crush Excel in ways that aren't even funny, well OK, it's funny too).
btw, libreoffice calc supports python macros, so you don't need to choose between the two
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Is python realistic for non tech people? I have a lot of databases across sharepoint but no real tech knowledge beyond basics.
It's one of the friendliest programming languages around. If you have written something in VBA then you'll do fine with Python, except for all the bad/outdated nonsense you'll have picked up from that language. And there's interactive interpreters you can just mess around in.
If this doesn't scare you then give it a look:
things = [4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42]
for number in things:
print(number * 16)
64
128
240
256
368
672
it was partly made for mathematicians who did not know how to develop software, but also for education. so I guess it's a good starter language. but it allows doing way too much things that will be very confusing when overused
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In what ways to they fail? I've used LibreOffice forever and don't have any specific complaints, but I'm definitely not using any of the more advanced features.
I love and use LibreOffice, but I do find Calc much harder to work with than Excel. PivotTables, sortable lists with locked headings and sort-buttons, even simply setting print area were all harder for me to get used to and implement on Calc than Excel.
I persist because I like the goal of FOSS, and it's "good enough" for my usage, I can definitely understand when people show frustrations - especially power users that have worked with MS Office for decades.
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That's because most people are not willing to migrate their macros and some formulas from excel (lazy fucks that they are). It's doable, I've done it, did it years ago, and now build new ones for libre office all the time.
I have never had to rely on, or even use, microshit's software since then, haven't had anything not work for me. Being the imbecile that I am at those things and having managed to make them work, it's just a matter of choosing to do it, which most people choose not to.
People always say this about LO.
I have a small finance consultancy, and we're a LO shop all day every day.
Its fine.
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