Commentary: More office chaos, please
LibreOffice wants to go into the browser and onto smartphones – even though Collabora has been doing that for a long time. Wasteful? On the contrary.
(Image: Moritz Förster / KI / iX)
LibreOffice wants to go into the browser, onto smartphones – and in the long term, even offer decentralized collaboration for users. The announcement by the Document Foundation marks one of the biggest strategic shifts in the project's history. Is this necessary?
After all, Collabora has been offering browser and mobile versions based on LibreOffice for years. OnlyOffice is vying for the same users. And with Euro-Office, another European office suite is currently emerging. Of all things, in the fight against the all-powerful Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, the open-source world is thus digging up the already scarce resources from each other.
A seemingly reasonable accusation. Why are multiple projects building similar functions in parallel? Why doesn't anyone bundle developer time, funding, and community work? Wouldn't a joint project simply be more efficient? Perhaps. But efficiency isn't everything.
When is fragmentation a problem?
The open-source office landscape appears increasingly fragmented. LibreOffice, Collabora, OnlyOffice, and now Euro-Office all seem to want to do the same thing. Users have to choose between alternative solutions, developers write similar functions multiple times, and organizations wonder which platform they should rely on in the long term.
From a project manager's perspective, this looks like waste. Too bad no one really knows which technical path will ultimately prove to be the right one.
The new LibreOffice strategy exemplifies this. The foundation is relying on a browser version with WebAssembly, where the computing work runs primarily locally in the browser. At the same time, it is considering peer-to-peer collaboration: documents should also be able to be synchronized without central cloud servers. This would be a real innovation compared to the server-centric models that characterize Microsoft 365 or Google Docs.
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Nobody can seriously predict today whether this approach will succeed. Perhaps the local browser execution will turned out to be a trump card for authorities, schools, and self-hosting. Perhaps users will remain loyal to central cloud services. But this very uncertainty is the price of innovation. Bundling all resources into a single project early on may avoid duplication of work, but it also prevents those technical experiments from which real alternatives can emerge.
Forks have repeatedly advanced open source
A look back proves this: After all, LibreOffice itself emerged in 2010 as a fork of OpenOffice. Even then, many warned of a split in the community. In retrospect, the decision was the new beginning of a project that is now considered the de facto standard for free office software.
Similar stories can be found in many areas of the open-source world. Nextcloud forked from ownCloud and became one of the best-known European open-source companies. MariaDB arose from concerns about the future of MySQL after the Oracle acquisition. Jenkins emerged from the Hudson project and became the standard tool for continuous integration. OpenSearch was created in response to license changes at Elasticsearch and built its own ecosystem within a few years.
All these examples have one thing in common: their success was by no means foreseeable. And the same criticism always arises: unnecessary fragmentation, double and triple work, wasted resources. Yet, it has paid off again and again.
This does not mean that every fork is automatically successful. Of course, projects fail; many ideas come to nothing. But open source doesn't work like a centrally planned corporation. No one has the authority or the knowledge to determine in advance which technical direction is the right one.
LibreOffice is doing what made LibreOffice great
This is precisely where LibreOffice is now picking up. The project exists at all only because developers decided 16 years ago not to focus on unity at any cost. LibreOffice owes its existence to a fork that many considered unnecessary at the time. And today, the Document Foundation is once again forging its own, but technically interesting, path.
Especially since the real opponents are not called Collabora, OnlyOffice, or Euro-Office, but Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. Open source can hardly compete with their market power through size or resources. If free software is to have a chance anyway, it must play to its real strength: the freedom to try out different ideas in parallel.
(fo)
