The Document Foundation (TDF) has pulled LibreOffice Online out of its "attic" – its term for retired projects – and is resuming development.
LibreOffice Online (LOOL) is the cloud-based version of LibreOffice. You could be forgiven if you haven't heard of it. Its development has been largely dormant since 2020. That will soon change. Earlier this week, TDF announced that LOOL is getting a fresh start.
The news follows a Document Foundation community vote earlier this month. Back in 2020, the organization decided to freeze development of LOOL, and despite an open letter calling for its revival in 2022, in TDF's attic it has remained.
What makes the decision a little stranger than it may seem, though, is that there already is an existing online browser-based flavor of LibreOffice. It's called Collabora Online, or COOL for short. It was announced in 2015 and has been updated regularly since: it's very much still around, and the current version is COOL 25.04.
Collabora, founded in 2005, is a for-profit company based in Cambridge, UK, and as The Register reported six years ago it provides the majority of the full-time paid developers working on the LibreOffice codebase. As we reported from the FOSDEM conference in 2025, it is still actively working on both the local, standalone version of LibreOffice, as well as on its own collaborative online edition.
As well as the paid-for COOL suite, Collabora offers a free edition, the Collabora Online Development Edition or CODE for short. Around the time of the last attempt to revive TDF's LOOL, we mentioned CODE 22.05, and a month later, we looked at its new features.
We weren't able to run it for ourselves, because although you can download packages and install them, COOL and CODE could only run when hosted on a web server. It's designed to integrate with some form of online file storage such as Nextcloud. What with having a day job and all, The Reg FOSS desk doesn't run its own web server – although we have been looking into it.
We use the past tense because that changed late last year. In November 2025, Collabora released Collabora Office for Desktop. Known as CODA, this runs locally on Windows, Linux or macOS, but like the cloud version, its UI is rendered using web technology – the announcement says it has an…
HTML + JavaScript-based front end, powered by your system's native browser engine (like WebKit, Chromium, etc.)
This is the same way that Ascensio's OnlyOffice suite works. We looked at OnlyOffice 7.3 a few years ago. We may revisit it soon: version 9.3 appeared this week.
As well as details of how they are implemented, both the Collabora suites and OnlyOffice share a modernized UI with a ribbon, much more like Microsoft Office 365 than the more traditional toolbar-and-menus interface found in LibreOffice by default – although LibreOffice also offers a ribbon-based look-and-feel if you want it.
Both the LibreOffice and Collabora suites are open source. The key difference is that TDF offers only the free-of-charge LibreOffice, nothing else. Collabora primarily offers paid support and services, although it does also offer free downloads of both the server and local versions.
Although TDF does recommend LibreOffice in business, it does not offer commercial support – for this, it has a Professional Support page. This does include Collabora, but the list appears in a different order every time the page is refreshed.
The demarcation used to be fairly clear. TDF offered only a local version, and Collabora offered a paid-for cloud-based version, with the free CODE edition for evaluation. Since November 2025, though, Collabora now also offers a local version.
The decision to "de-atticize" LOOL has been controversial. It's hard not to see TDF restarting development of the cloudy LOOL as a tit-for-tat move. Collabora's Michael Meeks voted and commented against the proposal. He told The Register:
It is an extraordinary decision. It is unclear what more we could give to try to help them recognize our value. We contributed around half of the highlighted features in 26.2.
We put this to TDF's public relations and marketing representative, Italo Vignoli, who last year retired from the organization's board of directors. He told us:
While I completely understand Michael Meeks's opposition, the decision of putting the LibreOffice Online repository in the attic was controversial, and many community members did not accept it.
As you know, open source software is not like proprietary software, where you have a single decision maker. The community behind LibreOffice is large, and spread over many continents, and there are people who want to contribute to LibreOffice Online only if the repository is hosted at TDF.
The only decision which has been taken is to de-atticize the repository, and not to develop a product.
We also spoke with Paolo Vecchi and Mike Saunders from TDF's board of directors. Vecchi told us:
LibreOffice Online is not in competition with Collabora. The decision to archive it was a mistake. The vote was wrong, and they fixed it, that's all. They are fixing the governance, and saying let's get the community on a level playing field – and then we'll move forward together.
The decision to revive LibreOffice Online is a bigger deal than it sounds. Although TDF directors do not see it this way, some might interpret it as TDF choosing to go into competition with its biggest commercial development partner, which has been making money from its cloud-hosted versions of LibreOffice for over a decade.
LibreOffice Online is not a product yet, and you can't download it. It may not be for months, or even years. But if you want to help it to become one, the source code is on GitHub. ®
Source: The register