Do I want to have a critical piece of open source financially dependent on Google with their conflict of interests wrt Google Suite or rather have it with Apache that has no other interests?
Do I want to have a critical piece of open source financially dependent on Google with their conflict of interests wrt Google Suite or rather have it with Apache that has no other interests?
We really have no other choice. The amount of security bugs lurking in OpenOffice is substantial and is widely considered a major risk. OpenOffice no longer has the manpower to find them or keep track of them. There's a reason why almost all Linux distributions have abandoned it for LibreOffice. OpenOffice is quite literally dead. It's like saying I'll stay on Linux 1.0 because that's before IBM started sponsoring it - the battle is completely lost.
As for funding, Google is almost irrelevant considering all the other people on the Advisory board, including GNOME, Red Hat, KDE, Collabora, and so forth. Even more funding is being provided by the new business partners who take LibreOffice and offer long-term enterprise support versions and contribute back, and there are four companies doing that (Collabora, allotropia, Adfinis, and CIB). Calling LibreOffice financially dependent on Google is completely unfounded at this time.
Heck, when your article about Google supporting LibreOffice was written, Google Docs was much younger with far less chance of success. It could have easily ended up in the Google Graveyard and I don't blame Google for hedging their bet on it.
https://www.documentfoundation.org/governance/advisory-board...