T rain-hopping at 5am one damp British March morning, Linux Format headed from the gloomy south-west of England to that centre of UK educational excellence that’s also dubbed the Silicon Fen – due to the number of tech startups it’s birthed – Cambridge. To be specific, the destination for this trip was Clare College, the second-oldest of Cambridge’s 31 colleges, just a short bus ride from the city centre.
It was here that Collabora was holding its COOL Days 2023 conference (you can read a report on that in LXF302), and while we were attending, we took the opportunity to catch up with managing director, ex-Novell developer, ex-OpenOffice contributor and, most importantly, ex-Linux Format columnist Michael Meeks, so he could explain what the heck document liberation is and why the EU is embracing Collabora Online like its life depended on it!
Linux Format: When Linux Format last spoke with you (Interview, LXF156), you were still working at Novell on OpenOffice and you didn’t have grey hair!
Michael Meeks: That’s what running a company can do! This was a while ago – 11 years? I don’t know whether we’ve told the story of that. SUSE looked across its portfolio and what people were working on, and decided that people hacking versions of LibreOffice on to Android probably wasn’t core to its server business.
I think it’s just a symptom of good management, after many years of indulging that passion for open source.Collabora) and gave us a contract to support SUSE’s customer needs, which continues to this day.
