FINDING EQUI-LIBRE-UM

Your favourite office suite needs help, as Jonni Bidwell finds out...

- Jonni Bidwell

Upon hearing the words "office suite for Linux" there's a good chance you'd think immediately of LibreOffice. Yes, there are others, but LibreOffice (with a couple of exceptions) has for many years been the de facto standard for wrangling documents on Linux.

Not only that, but The Open Document formats have become so widespread that businesses and even the UK government uses them. The applications may been mocked for looking like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint from the late 90s, but there's no denying they're a powerhouse of productivity. Also, we never liked Microsoft's 'modern' ribbon interface...

But have you ever stopped to think how this huge project is maintained and sustained? Perhaps you've heard of The Document Foundation, perhaps not. For years this has been lobbying and advocating for digital equality and document sovereignty since its establishment in 2010. Through libre productivity software, interoperability, good documentation, and translations for as many languages as possible, the independent non-profit meritocracy aims to make the world a better place.

Most big projects have the backing of some sort of foundation, and it's generally inferred that foundations provide support not only in the shape of governance, but also materially, in the form of cold, hard cash. For LibreOffice though, this isn't quite true. Today, a great deal of LibreOffice development is done by open-source champions Collabora, the UK-Canada consultancy that's contributed extensively to projects as diverse as Chromium, Wayland and Steamos. And to pay their bills they've created Collabora Office, a supported, enterprise edition of LibreOffice.