italovignoli

At the time, Oracle wanted to completely drop OpenOffice.org, but there was a contract with IBM which could use the source code to produce their proprietary Symphony office suite. Because of this contact, Oracle was not able to drop OOo and had to follow IBM's request to give the source code to ASF to create Apache OpenOffice. IBM openly declared the intention to kill LibreOffice during a call with The Document Foundation Steering Committee on April 30, 2011. I was in the call, and I regret I did not record the call.

The situation is incredibly complex, and explaining it in full would need a book. The blog post is clear enough for the prople who have followed LibreOffice as a project, while other people have to do some research to understand all the details.

IBM has created Apache OpenOffice to kill LibreOffice. The Document Foundation has a Board of Directors. The TDC project damaged the relations between companies and community. The Document Foundation has a team. The authorities are the German authorities overseeing not for profit foundations. The third audit in 2025 was after the first audit in 2023 and the second audit in 2024. Collabora is a LibreOffice ecosystem company. All of the above has been explained at lengths in the project's blog, chats and mailing lists.

OnlyOffice is proprietary software, or freeware if you prefer (they modify the AGPL licence with clauses which are not compliant with the OSD), and by natively supporting the proprietary Microsoft Office document format locks in their users to Microsoft (the company controlling the closed and proprietary format). True free software advocates should avoid it.

DOCX files created by LibreOffice are not only smaller but simpler in term of XML structure, and easier to interoperate. A two-page file created from scratch is 1100 XML lines if written by LibreOffice and 11500 XML lines if written by Microsoft Office. The 10400 redundant XML lines are there to make it difficult to properly read the file. Also, they may contain non-standard elements which have been deprecated before the approval of the standard itself but are still there after 12 years.

You are probably not aware of the issues related to Microsoft Office files, which are intentionally bloated with useless XML contents to make interoperability almost impossible. A cleaner XML improves interoperability, even if you do not think it helps. The reality is that until people will consider Microsoft Office files as a reference, anything else will fail WRT interoperability because those files are developed to kill interoperability.