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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

There seems to be a very large elephant missing from that discussion which is the rise of SaaS office suites. Speaking personally, I'm very glad that there is a free software office suite (as well as drawing programs etc.) However, I sincerely hope that collaborating on documents and presentations by mailing them around to people and trying to merge their edits and comments is never again the norm for me. Shared documents are probably a much overlooked enabler for people to work remotely in the current situation.

Added: They do mention LibreOffice Online but that seems like it should be a more central point in the discussion.

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I agree, the main point I would expect from "The next five years of LibreOffice" would be a self-hosted competitor to Google Docs and Office 365. There's definitely a place for a local application editing documents, but I don't think that's what's going to matter the most five years from now when compared to a solid web based alternative -- and I also don't think a "code freeze" for the "normal" LibreOffice (not that I'm advocating one) would make the product unusable five years down the road.

It's there but with the clear and explicit intention that the free version will lag behind the commercial offers.

They have a self-hosted online suite, it's called Collabora.

It's a spinoff

https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/

The former LibreOffice development team from SUSE joined Collabora in September 2013 forming the subsidiary Collabora Productivity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collabora_Online

I find it really odd that they chose server side rendering. I only did a very brief demo of it, but I was not impressed.

Yes, unfortunately. Makes impossible to work under unstable connections.

I hope Webasm enable porting at least some of the rendering code to client-side in the future.

Why not just use a desktop program with online features, then?

I'd assume that's less of a "chose" and more of technical limitation caused by wanting to reuse all the legacy code.

There's definitely a market for self-hosting as in the case of Nextcloud, for example. There are lots of reasons companies, much less governments, may not feel comfortable using Google or Microsoft SaaS offerings.

But, as you say, that's different from running a local application. While some heavy-duty multimedia still benefits from running an app locally, that ship has mostly sailed with office suite software. I still have LibreOffice installed on most of my systems, but even if I'm not collaborating on a document, it's incredibly useful to have docs that are "just there" and I can access from any device--even including my phone in a pinch.

I don't think making a web-based version would make sense for TDF. It would basically have to be done from scratch and OnlyOffice is already years ahead of them in that. Any attempt to port the existing code to the web also seems destined to fail (see Collabora).

What I think would really make LO stand out is strong collaboration support in the existing desktop editors. A self-hostable headless sync backend that streams real-time changes from and to everyone who has the document open would be even better than GDocs, which is notoriously slow due to being all in a browser.

IMO if LibreOffice really want to be in it for the money, they need to move away from trying to catch up to Office (not possible) and target some other niche which actually differentiates themselves. The fact that Airtable and Notion are around and pretty successful means that people can and are spending money on document management solutions that are not Office.

A better API is one such point. Microsoft APIs always suck, and LibreOffice could be the thing that has a rich interface that allows you to build XLSX and DOCX files via an API. For a product that has been around for more than 20 years (if you count StarOffice), I expect the API story to be much better than https://api.libreoffice.org/examples/examples.html

Agreed - students have already moved to google docs or MS Word with OneDrive. We are used to giving feedback using these tools, students making changes and getting those signed off by us.

Full history of changes. Full history of lecturer comments. Backed up online. Editable on phones, laptops, PCs...

This is the world they are expecting when they enter employment, or start their own start up.

To be honest, I'm a bit surprised that there's still the level of apparent interest in standalone LibreOffice that there is. I work somewhere that was almost exclusively a LibreOffice shop but we adopted one of the online services. Although we didn't really force people to switch, I don't know the last time I've seen a LibreOffice document even if I imagine some people still use it.

Office suites are a huge piece of the pie so even minority use cases get a decent number of users.

Collabora is an open-source, self-hosted, online collaborative office suite built on top of LibreOffice. Take a look, you may find it useful.

It's been a few years but I had a client that needed some secure remote file access capability "like DropBox" so I spun up an ownCloud VM and it had a surprising amount of collaboration tools built-in. It had all the groups, permissions, sharing, etc stuff you'd expect, and you could open and edit Office documents in the browser (it was a web-based Zoho Word/Excel type editor if I remember correctly.) It also had automatic versioning so if someone jacked up one of the files, they could roll back to whenever.

For anyone looking for that sort of thing, ownCloud might not seem like an obvious choice but I was pleasantly surprised.

> They do mention LibreOffice Online

And it says there is revenue there, correct? Maybe that's why it isn't expanded.

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