LibreOffice wants to integrate into the browser, into smartphones – and in the long term, even offer decentralized collaboration for users. announcement by the Document Foundation marks one of the biggest strategic changes in the project's history.
But is it necessary?
After all, there's also Collabora, which has been offering browser and mobile versions of LibreOffice for years. OnlyOffice competes for the same users. And now Euro-Office, another European office suite is currently emerging. In the fight against the almighty Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, the open source world seems to be wasting its already scarce resources.
Why do so many projects build similar features in parallel? Why don't they combine time, funding, and community work? Wouldn't a joint project be more efficient? Maybe. But efficiency isn't everything.
When is fragmentation a problem?
The open-source office landscape seems increasingly fragmented. LibreOffice, Collabora, OnlyOffice and now Euro-Office seem to want to do the same thing. Users will have to choose between alternatives, developers will write similar functions many times over and organizations will wonder which platform they should use in the long run.
No one can truly know which technical path will ultimately prove to be the correct one.
LibreOffice's new strategy demonstrates this. The Document Foundation is based on a browser version with WebAssembly, where the computational work is mostly done locally in the browser. At the same time, it looks at peer-to-peer collaboration: documents should be able to be synchronized without central cloud servers. This would be a real innovation compared to the server-based models that characterize Microsoft 365 or Google Docs.
No one can seriously predict today whether this approach will succeed. Perhaps running an open-source office in a local browser will prove to be a boon for authorities, schools, governments, and self-hosting. Perhaps users will remain loyal to centralized cloud services.
This very uncertainty is the price of innovation. Pooling all resources into a single project early on can prevent wasted work, but it also prevents the technical experiments that can lead to real alternatives.
Forks have repeatedly promoted open source
A look back at the past proves this: After all, LibreOffice itself appeared in 2010 as a fork of OpenOffice. At the time, 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 open source communities. Nextcloud spun off from ownCloud and became one of the most well-known European open source companies. MariaDB emerged out of concerns about the future of MySQL after the Oracle acquisition. OpenSearch was created in response to the licensing changes to Elasticsearch and has built its own ecosystem within a few years.
All these examples have one thing in common: Their success was by no means predictable. And there was always the same criticism: unnecessary fragmentation, double and triple work, waste of resources. Yet it has paid off time and time again.
This doesn't mean that every fork will automatically be successful. Of course, projects fail. Many ideas end up in nothing. But open source software doesn't operate like a centrally planned company. No one has the authority or knowledge to determine in advance which technical direction is the right one.
LibreOffice does what made LibreOffice great
That's where LibreOffice comes in. The project only exists because the 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 blazing its own, but technically interesting, path.
Especially since the real rivals are not called Collabora, OnlyOffice or Euro-Office, but Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. Open source software can hardly compete with their market power through size or resources. Free software should leverage its real strength: the freedom to try different ideas in parallel.
Although the press releases will range from very select to rare, I said I'd pass...because sometimes the editors hide.
