I contributed my inputs to the discussion threat that raised the issue of "community" branding.
What I said was: keep the current libreoffice as is because that is what it is. Additionally, go and create another "business office" or whatever you care about but leave libreoffice as is.
The businesses behind this move, collabora et al see libreoffice as another "market" they need to acquire. Foss be damned.
During this time, I learned that all the "donations" to tdf are used for "conferences and shit" instead of what as donors we assume it would be used for, "paying developers" because of some stupid quirk, they cannot "compete with businesses" or other nonsense.
I have started using calligra office and it has been a similar experience. Nothing to write home about but still not depressing as libreoffice gets at times.
I dont know, onlyoffice flipped against the "community edition" by restricting features and I feel LO going there slowly because of "early business advanced features" in the business edition that would come because of this change.
That leaves us with calligra office suite which is still holding out but yeah, my money is now on that.
Note: i have been a OpenOffice /libreoffice user since 2008 I think so I have been using it for over 12-13 years.
I got off LibreOffice myself to OnlyOffice. Docx support wasnt that impressive.
One thing I wanted to ask to you since you seem very experienced with LibreOffice is how much effort and money is spent on ODT and other formats. Why not simply use and improve docx like we do with pdf?
Second, Is Libreoffice's goal is to be MS Office's OSS clone? If not why? MS Office is quite good and the potential office apps users are mostly non-programmers.
out of curiosity, why do you use an open source office product when a variety of free & high quality web based document editors exist? I chafe when I need to use the microsoft office suite at this point, and premium editors look more like grammarly than word.
In the corporate/business use case there are both open source and cheap licensed/self-hosted versions of web based editors.
I prefer a local spreadsheet over a browser spreadsheet, because the browser spreadsheets don't always update all the dependent cells consistently. Sometimes, they need to send something back and forth to a server and that's slow and irritating. Resizing columns seems better in a local app than in a browser too, but I'm not totally sure about that.
I don't really use a word processor or other parts of an office suite very often.
That is a weird way of referring to value being collectively added to a free software project. I contributed to LibreOffice for five years before being hired. I even did onboarding without compensation, with increasing intensity and regularity. I quite happily worked alongside people employed by various companies and I learned a lot.
why isnt TDF hiring actual programmers? why are you looking for outside volunteer help when you can do programming in house? its not like TDF is cash strapped or anything?
or does leadership at TDF have that mozilla ceo style BS mindset (paying herself millions of dollars salary while laying off actual developers because of cash issues)
"TDF highlights that 73% of commits are from developers employed by these partners, including Collabora, Red Hat and CIB/allotropia, which are made in the course of supporting their enterprise customers."
Red Hat pays Red Hat devs from Red Hat subscriptions, not from LibreOffice donations. If TDF wants to prove the money is going to devs they are going to have to do better than a statement that their partners are the contributors.
Why are you talking about donations? TDF is saying that businesses shouldn't use the community version and instead buy a supported version from their partners. Unsurprisingly, if you do that, their partners get money.
Collabora is ~$18/user/year so not bad. CIB may have pricing available in another browser, but in Firefox Focus all it has is an unclosable dialog about cookies in German.
Most of my coworkers in the enterprise I work for use LibreOffice, but the business itself has made no such decision. We're all remote workers, and the business provides none of us with locally run software, or any hardware, just lots of SaaS apps.
So a spreadsheet file gets passed around, usually from a client, and we're just expected to figure out how to read it. Those of us without MS Office already installed for something else usually install LibreOffice, including me.
Is the business doing something wrong here? Should they buy us all copies from Redhat instead of leaving it to us? Am I doing something wrong by using the free version for my enterprise work? Should I pay for a copy out of my salary?
Is the hardware paid for by you or the business? If the hardware is paid for by the business then everything on that hardware is essentially business property, unless that business declares otherwise, and thus the business should be providing you with properly licensed software.
No employee hardware is payed for by the business. We all use our own machines, and all three major operating systems are well represented. So in your opinion we're all ethically in the clear?
You're an employee in an enterprise, so I bet the following applies to you:
"TDF stressed that LibreOffice 7.1 "Community" is meant for individuals and that means specifically not enterprise organizations."
The license is free software and it would be suicide for TDF to switch the whole project to proprietary software. Therefore companies are in the clear and will likely remain so for a long time if not forever.
That's more aggressive begging than a mandate. They have a license for a reason, and that license clearly allows OP's use case. If they do not need the "business" level features Libre's partners offer I see no reason to upgrade.
Computers are semi cheap but this is still quite crazy to require employees to come with their own tools to be able to work. I'm happy to live in a country were employers have an obligation to provide that.
LibreOffice offers their suite under the MPL[1], which doesn't restrict usage by corporations as long as they comply with the terms of the license (just like any other individual). And if the corporation allows this software to be used on their hardware, that seems to be "properly licensed".
Sure, big companies or ones with boomer culture work like this. In practice, at startups I've BYOD easily, I've used company hardware for things not company related, etc. Etc. They're not dicks about it.
It's been a great benefit to have full control over my own hardware and local software. I'd hate to lose it. In particular I'd hate to have to use something other than Linux, but in practice I'd be forced onto an Apple box, which is dominant in the company.
It's much the same as using my own home to work in. If they were required to provide me with an office, and I had to use it, whatever benefit there is would not go to me.
> Your employer should be providing the tools for you to do the job
Why? Skilled tradesmen frequently own their own tools, and many wouldn't have it any other way. You can bet your ass many of them have spent an order of magnitude more on their tools than a few measly software licenses ($20 for a text editor? Extortionist! But a cheap cordless drill costs several times that...) In California, employers are only required to provide the tools necessary for a job if they're paying you less than twice minimum wage, a bar you surely clear.
Skilled tradesmen are self-employed, and work as contractors to their clients.
Software developers who work as independent contractors generally own their own equipment and software (in Australia that's actually one of the legal criteria for determining whether someone is a contractor or an employee for taxation purposes).
Whereas employees generally use company-supplied hardware and software, which is to the employer's benefit as they have full control over it.
But that's really by the by; whoever is procuring software to be used for commercial purposes, it is reasonable to expect they would purchase commercial licenses to help fund the development of their tools.
Why should it matter to HQ? The result of the work probably matters (i.e. a document), but the software used to create it? Doesn't really matter so long as it can be read. There are so many ways to do IT than the old central control of all the things model from the 90s.
At the same time, IT is not everyone's forte. If you're a office worker that types documents and looks at spreadsheets, should you be expected to know if the document suite you're using has a zero day that was just released?
I trust you're not being malicious, and I trust that you're not trying to be insecure, but software is a complex world now.
No you're right which is why usually you have some very sane default like Google Sheets and then let people escape hatch when they need to. Then you hire the people who won't use the escape hatch to bring Bonzibuddy PolitburoSuite to do their spreadsheets.
So you're a WFH developer AND a sec expert? If you had those skills you wouldn't be writing code. For example, would you use SMS for 2FA? (Hint: Many trust it, but shouldn't, right?)
This isn't about trust or not. It's about liability. It's about accountability. It's about reasonable expectations. It's about making sure you're not putting your team in a compromising position. It's about not assuming.
Depending on your industry, not providing hardware could end up in sketchy legal ground.
Generally speaking, any software development activities I perform on my company issued laptop can be interpreted as belonging to the company without prior agreement. If I was using my own machine - it's likely the company would try to enforce security policies on it, or claim ownership of anything I develop on my hardware. While I am not a lawyer - Given the shrink-wrapped nature of such contracts, it's likely an employee could challenge this in court.
> ...according to TDF [The Document Foundation], there's growing trend among enterprises to choose the Community version, rather than one of the paid-for versions provided by TDF's partners, such as Collabora, and support partners, such as Red Hat. The foundation is concerned a lack of enterprise support is threatening the sustainability of the LibreOffice project because it's slowing down development.
Linux has been able to get enterprise support -- by becoming a critical piece of underlying infrastructure for new products and services provided by businesses. For example, see https://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/join/members/
The Apache Software Foundation has been able to get enterprise support -- also by becoming a critical piece of underlying infrastructure for new products and services provided by businesses. For example, see https://www.apache.org/foundation/thanks.html
The open-source scientific computing stack has been able to get enterprise support -- also by becoming a critical piece of underlying infrastructure for new products and services provided by businesses. For example, see https://numfocus.org/sponsors
Can Libreoffice become a critical piece of underlying infrastructure, atop which businesses can build new products and services?
No and that's precisely why a company will opt for the Community version. It seems an open-source product should insert itself in the profit vertical of a company if that product demands the company pay for it.
LibreOffice has incidentally asked the question of how much and what kind of support people actually need from an office suite. This information was always hidden in the past-- how much were people paying for MS Office because they wanted to be able to call someone when it crashes, and how much to avoid the BSA Goon Squad knocking in their door?
If anything, I'd think there's less enterprise support needed and more direct-to-consumer.
Your big organization doesn't need to call Microsoft with every question because they have someone who has been living inside Excel since 1992, knows every nuance, and can untangle you from whatever you've done. But most home/SMB users don't have that, and would pay $10 or $20 every few months for a-la-carte hand-holding and support sessions, buy a $49 streaming video course or book, etc.
Well it's hardly surprising given the design of their web site. I've used libreoffice for years and have never noticed the 'for business' link before. Add to that that if you go to download Libre Office and end up on some site trying to flog you something like collabra or whatever, it sounds like you've gone to the wrong place.
Even if you get past that barrier, the most obvious button is 'try collabra office' which pops up one of those bullshit contact forms where you just expect the company to try to rinse you for whatever subscription they can get out of you. No thanks.
Prompted by this comment, I tried to search for the 'for business' link. I couldn't find it. I looked around the blog, the document foundation website, and the LibreOffice website.
I read the page, and I'm still not clear what they want me to do. Do they want me to buy something from one of their partners? If so, what do they want me to buy, and why is it better (either for me or the developers) than just using the free LibreOffice?
I actually _do_ need a document and spreadsheet suite which works on Linux, and I would pay for one which works well. At the moment I kind of get by between Google Docs (generally reliable, functionality often not quite there) and LibreOffice (lots of functionality, UI feels clunky, sometimes crashes). If LibreOffice are offering me something that makes my life better, I will likely buy it.
Absolutely - the collabora office site is terrible! They seem to have some sort of cloud version too but then don’t mention the price of it at all. The whole site looks sketchy and unofficial. No support as standard, without paying thousands of pounds a year (Microsoft offers great SMB support in my experience).
Maybe they should look introspectively at why nobody wants to sign up rather than blaming the users. Users will sign up if there is enough value and it’s clearly communicated.
The value could at least be support - this to me would be the minimum expectation for any type of enterprise software, but amazingly it isn't offered in any of their packages (they just state that documentation = support!). Even in smb & enterprise plans it is "pay for a bug fix if you find a bug".
It is amazing to me that they expect a paying SMB user, who has discovered a bug in the code, to pay £12,000 for them to fix it! Then they wonder why nobody signs up - what a joke!
I looked for ZDNet's source to see where it was getting such tone-deaf and counter-productive messaging. It's from the actual release announcement discussed earlier this week!
Open source sustainability is a real problem, but spending the first seven paragraphs of a release announcement berating a bunch of your users as freeloaders is a really bad look.
Many enterprises are moving away from thick client office software and moving to browser based office software with cloud backends. Google apps, Zoho, OnlyOffice, Bitrix, and Microsoft all have very usable cloud offerings. Collabora is trying to build an LibreOffice based cloud offering, but LibreOfice remains old-style "thick client" software.
Apache OpenOffice is still available and free. LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice, and gained marketshare by building goodwill with users who did not trust Oracle or (to a much lesser extent) the Apache Foundation.
Having three "enterprise" partners to buy from makes it hard. I don't have a business relationship with CIB, Collabora, or Adfinis SyGroup, and honestly, I don't know why packaged office software would require one.
In short, I think there's a deep marketing problem here, and a misunderstanding of something fundamentally different about free software (using the Stallman meaning): it is possible to have widely used software that is critical to a user, but where that user is not willing to pay for it. This is because the user selected it because it was free (as in freedom) and the user knows they do not have to cooperate with a market capture by a developer.
I don't think that there's a problem trusting the Apache Foundation. I think that under the Apache Foundation's supervision, OpenOffice did nearly nothing in the last five years, while LibreOffice fixed bugs and added features.
Libre office was actually created earlier, while Sun was still at the helm. When Oracle took over it got more mindshare only a short bit later Oracle "donated" it to the ASF.
Given the sheer number of companies still using Office 2010 or 2007 or older, thick clients aren't the problem.
A huge part of the LibreOffice value proposition is price. And choosing free LibreOffice over paid Office is a lot easier than choosing a paid option. Once you open the conversation about paying, Office is a no-brainer and you need a compelling reason to switch to something else.
> For enterprise-class deployments, TDF has strongly recommended the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners – for desktop, mobile and cloud – with long-term support options, professional assistance, custom features and other benefits, including SLA (Service Level Agreements).
My company doesn't need this. We just need a program do open documents and spreadsheets. We don't need an ecosystem, we don't need their cloud, we don't need mobile suppoet, custom features, "professional assistance" or SLAs.
> Despite this recommendation, an increasing number of enterprises have chosen the version supported by volunteers over the version optimized for their needs.
Let that sink in for a second. Basically TDF is saying "we know what's best for you - it's paying us for things you don't need".
It's completely tone-deaf and I'm seriously considering creating a fork called FuckTDF-Suite with everything being identical except removing all mentions of "Community", "Enterprise", and donation prompts.
First Elastic, now this. If you're just salty about not getting money and don't care about the principles of free software, go sell your soul and work for M$FT or Goolag.
It might be tone deaf they way they did it but it is a real problem.
I've nothing against small groups doing a bit of guerrilla marketing, like one that showed up in a post share earlier this weekend along the lines of: "this program is shared under thr MIT and the GPL license but with the social expectation <something something>".
If we want to release out main product as open source we cannot expect to become wildly profitable, but at the same time we as developers should get better at advocating for such projects with our managers and our customers.
I often do that when there is something the company I work for need and depend on: I look for support contracts etc. Usually this works great, once devs ignored me and changed the rules after we signed up (handsontable I think), which is of course annoying.
If your company is not clogging up their community support forums then you are not the intended audience for this.
The project provides an open source MS Office replacement for free, not an IT department.
Their community support forums are for home users, not the accounts department stuck trying to balance the end of year spreadsheet. Pay for their "enterprise" support if it is business critical, or buy MS Office and see how much end user support you get with that.
Newer versions of libreoffice have been almost unusably buggy for me: constant crashes, and track changes + undo has all kinds of weird quirks and sometimes makes entire paragraphs disappear. I would not recommend it in a business context even if interoperability with Word wasn't an issue.
I hate to sound harsh, particularly when I've been benefiting from their work for years, but it's hard to imagine a workplace that would put up with those bugs.
And when attempting to find this "enterprise" version, you have to go to one of their companies to get it... None of which provide prices, and only 1 of which I could find a "request" button to get a price.
It’s really bizarre that the release notes for the community edition version 7.1 spends a lot of space not to talk about it what’s in the release but to tell businesses not to use the community edition and how the avoidance of the enterprise edition is causing issues. Is this a cultural thing? I would’ve thought that someone who wanted to convey this message could’ve stated in one sentence that this is not meant for businesses and provided a link to a knowledge base article on the differences between the community edition and enterprise edition (which could include explanations about volunteer efforts and compromises).
If someone wants to know why businesses should prefer a non-community edition, are we supposed to link to a point-in-time relevant release notes blog post?
Probably a little too bit conspiratorial, but anyone wonder if Redhat had something to do with this? This sounds oddly like the Centos announcement recently.
To me, it’s not surprising that businesses who are reluctant to pay for Office or Google Apps, are also reluctant to pay for commercial support for Libre Office.
Very few businesses stay away from proprietary software because of philosophical disagreements over licensing. Most just don’t want to spend money if they can get away with it.
Of course, we know that most businesses are not like this and do pay for perceived value. But I’m concerned that TDF are chasing a market that’s deeply reluctant to dig into its pockets.
i have an idea.
1. there will be a crippled QT style LTS version only "community edition" or onlyoffice style "community edition" which is just to appease the "foss" gods while in reality it is crippled and there to force people to "pay up".
2. if not the first part, second one would be kinda like how "enterprise" users get updates and "features" first and the "community" edition would get those as afterthought. This one is what collabora at least for what i know is doing for a long time with their customers but once the "business" version goes popular and the companies get more into serving these users, the "freeloaders" would be given less and less preference.
3. once companies like Collabora or others get "big enough", i see no problem for microsoft or other company to do "embrace, extend and extinguish" because that is essentially what collabora has done to libreoffice.
i think the second one or a combination of both would be the future of libroffice in my opinion from the stuff TDF is putting out.
Question: why is TDF a marketing machine for collabora and other companies?
Libreoffice provides a commodity for free. That's the whole value proposition. It's implied by the Libre part of the name. So, convincing businesses to donate money out of charity for "support" is not a business plan and never has been. The call for businesses to please pay up seems to indicate that the shift to introducing a community edition had little to no effect on the bank balances of the companies peddling vague support contracts and LTS versions of LibreOffice. IMHO that was a doomed and rather desperate move at the time and this rather desperate call for "please give us some money" just doesn't resonate with me at all. Why do I need to pay? For what exactly?
I'm well aware that the consequence of nobody paying for this might mean feature development will vastly reduce and probably support will drop to a handful of people occasionally patching up and recompiling the same old software that has been more than good enough for the last decade. That's actually fine with me as I can't actually name a single thing they've added in the last 15 years that actually matters to me; at all.
To be clear, I'm so indifferent about office suites in general at this point that I haven't actually had a copy of LibreOffice on any of my computers in years. The need just never came up lately. And that would have been almost exclusively people emailing me stuff created with MS Office before that. Just not a thing any more. I also don't use any MS Office products. I seem to have been in companies that use Google Docs the last few years and I get by with the limited feature set provided by that. Their collaborative features are awesome though and a good reason to put up with their otherwise limited features. Office tools just no longer are the must have tool to have for people. And in so far they are, they are a worthless commodity.
> Libreoffice provides a commodity for free. That's the whole value proposition. It's implied by the Libre part of the name.
In fact the opposite is true. Because “free” in English can be used both for freedom and for beer, the terms “libre” and “gratis” can be used to clarify what you’re talking about when you say “free”. Libre means freedom, as in liberty, and makes no reference to the price.
Of course LibreOffice is free of charge, and almost all open source software is, but the name definitely doesn’t imply it.
Way to set us all back another 10 years before we can expect to actually get away with using anything other than MS Office for day to day interaction with everyone else in your own or any other company.
We WANT big companies to use LO, or anything else, simply so that it becomes acceptable and supported to do so, you freaking oafs.
If you work for nothing then you are signalling to the world that your work is worth nothing. So guess what: that is exactly what people are going to pay: nothing.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 200 ms ] threadI contributed my inputs to the discussion threat that raised the issue of "community" branding.
What I said was: keep the current libreoffice as is because that is what it is. Additionally, go and create another "business office" or whatever you care about but leave libreoffice as is.
The businesses behind this move, collabora et al see libreoffice as another "market" they need to acquire. Foss be damned.
During this time, I learned that all the "donations" to tdf are used for "conferences and shit" instead of what as donors we assume it would be used for, "paying developers" because of some stupid quirk, they cannot "compete with businesses" or other nonsense.
I have started using calligra office and it has been a similar experience. Nothing to write home about but still not depressing as libreoffice gets at times. I dont know, onlyoffice flipped against the "community edition" by restricting features and I feel LO going there slowly because of "early business advanced features" in the business edition that would come because of this change. That leaves us with calligra office suite which is still holding out but yeah, my money is now on that. Note: i have been a OpenOffice /libreoffice user since 2008 I think so I have been using it for over 12-13 years.
One thing I wanted to ask to you since you seem very experienced with LibreOffice is how much effort and money is spent on ODT and other formats. Why not simply use and improve docx like we do with pdf?
Second, Is Libreoffice's goal is to be MS Office's OSS clone? If not why? MS Office is quite good and the potential office apps users are mostly non-programmers.
I know PDF is by adobe and Docx is by microsoft.
Showing that an open file format could do everything was a big part of forcing Microsoft to switch from .doc to .docx, which is much more open
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
In the corporate/business use case there are both open source and cheap licensed/self-hosted versions of web based editors.
I don't really use a word processor or other parts of an office suite very often.
I am paid by TDF to onboard new contributors. I think it is going rather well, with many FOSS outsiders being lured in.
Conference expenses are a small part of the budget. A software project is much more than pure development.
or does leadership at TDF have that mozilla ceo style BS mindset (paying herself millions of dollars salary while laying off actual developers because of cash issues)
TDF was set up as a German charity in a way that it can not operate like a full-blown software company. It has a staff of 11 (some part time like me).
TDF is funding development constantly by contracting out work. Budget item proposals for this year: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Budget2021
TDF ledgers are public: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/Ledgers
Annual reports are also produced as required by German law: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2020/08/10/tdf-annu...
why?
isnt mozilla working just fine as a software company run on donations? why is libreoffice dependent on 70% development commits by collabora?
this model has clearly not worked in the interest of community so why is TDF even pretending to be someone they are not?
contract work is not same as full time employees.
why this pretence?
In a delicate situation like that, don't you think it would have been rather brazen to go for a Mozilla Corporation type of model?
I get that they want funds to develop LibreOffice but it’s not like the money is being spent on development at all.
"TDF highlights that 73% of commits are from developers employed by these partners, including Collabora, Red Hat and CIB/allotropia, which are made in the course of supporting their enterprise customers."
So a spreadsheet file gets passed around, usually from a client, and we're just expected to figure out how to read it. Those of us without MS Office already installed for something else usually install LibreOffice, including me.
Is the business doing something wrong here? Should they buy us all copies from Redhat instead of leaving it to us? Am I doing something wrong by using the free version for my enterprise work? Should I pay for a copy out of my salary?
If LibreOffice doesn't like this use, they can change to a less libre license. That's the point of proprietary and mixed licenses.
[1] https://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/licenses
So yes, they should be providing an office suite whether that be Office365/ Libre Office / etc.
It's much the same as using my own home to work in. If they were required to provide me with an office, and I had to use it, whatever benefit there is would not go to me.
Why? Skilled tradesmen frequently own their own tools, and many wouldn't have it any other way. You can bet your ass many of them have spent an order of magnitude more on their tools than a few measly software licenses ($20 for a text editor? Extortionist! But a cheap cordless drill costs several times that...) In California, employers are only required to provide the tools necessary for a job if they're paying you less than twice minimum wage, a bar you surely clear.
Software developers who work as independent contractors generally own their own equipment and software (in Australia that's actually one of the legal criteria for determining whether someone is a contractor or an employee for taxation purposes).
Whereas employees generally use company-supplied hardware and software, which is to the employer's benefit as they have full control over it.
But that's really by the by; whoever is procuring software to be used for commercial purposes, it is reasonable to expect they would purchase commercial licenses to help fund the development of their tools.
I can't imagine how security and privacy are of no concern. Has that been cleared by legal? Or is it laziness and/or negligence?
I trust you're not being malicious, and I trust that you're not trying to be insecure, but software is a complex world now.
This isn't about trust or not. It's about liability. It's about accountability. It's about reasonable expectations. It's about making sure you're not putting your team in a compromising position. It's about not assuming.
Generally speaking, any software development activities I perform on my company issued laptop can be interpreted as belonging to the company without prior agreement. If I was using my own machine - it's likely the company would try to enforce security policies on it, or claim ownership of anything I develop on my hardware. While I am not a lawyer - Given the shrink-wrapped nature of such contracts, it's likely an employee could challenge this in court.
Linux has been able to get enterprise support -- by becoming a critical piece of underlying infrastructure for new products and services provided by businesses. For example, see https://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/join/members/
The Apache Software Foundation has been able to get enterprise support -- also by becoming a critical piece of underlying infrastructure for new products and services provided by businesses. For example, see https://www.apache.org/foundation/thanks.html
The open-source scientific computing stack has been able to get enterprise support -- also by becoming a critical piece of underlying infrastructure for new products and services provided by businesses. For example, see https://numfocus.org/sponsors
Can Libreoffice become a critical piece of underlying infrastructure, atop which businesses can build new products and services?
If anything, I'd think there's less enterprise support needed and more direct-to-consumer.
Your big organization doesn't need to call Microsoft with every question because they have someone who has been living inside Excel since 1992, knows every nuance, and can untangle you from whatever you've done. But most home/SMB users don't have that, and would pay $10 or $20 every few months for a-la-carte hand-holding and support sessions, buy a $49 streaming video course or book, etc.
Even if you get past that barrier, the most obvious button is 'try collabra office' which pops up one of those bullshit contact forms where you just expect the company to try to rinse you for whatever subscription they can get out of you. No thanks.
I eventually search for 'business' on the LibreOffice website, and found this article: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business...
Now I see that this article is linked in the 'Download' menu.
Even being on this page, it's not clear what they want me to do (unless I read the whole page, but c'mon).
I'm with you, if they want more people to use the Enterprise edition they need to do a better job of educating people that it exists.
I actually _do_ need a document and spreadsheet suite which works on Linux, and I would pay for one which works well. At the moment I kind of get by between Google Docs (generally reliable, functionality often not quite there) and LibreOffice (lots of functionality, UI feels clunky, sometimes crashes). If LibreOffice are offering me something that makes my life better, I will likely buy it.
Maybe they should look introspectively at why nobody wants to sign up rather than blaming the users. Users will sign up if there is enough value and it’s clearly communicated.
It is amazing to me that they expect a paying SMB user, who has discovered a bug in the code, to pay £12,000 for them to fix it! Then they wonder why nobody signs up - what a joke!
https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2021/02/03/libreoff...
Open source sustainability is a real problem, but spending the first seven paragraphs of a release announcement berating a bunch of your users as freeloaders is a really bad look.
Many enterprises are moving away from thick client office software and moving to browser based office software with cloud backends. Google apps, Zoho, OnlyOffice, Bitrix, and Microsoft all have very usable cloud offerings. Collabora is trying to build an LibreOffice based cloud offering, but LibreOfice remains old-style "thick client" software.
Apache OpenOffice is still available and free. LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice, and gained marketshare by building goodwill with users who did not trust Oracle or (to a much lesser extent) the Apache Foundation.
Having three "enterprise" partners to buy from makes it hard. I don't have a business relationship with CIB, Collabora, or Adfinis SyGroup, and honestly, I don't know why packaged office software would require one.
In short, I think there's a deep marketing problem here, and a misunderstanding of something fundamentally different about free software (using the Stallman meaning): it is possible to have widely used software that is critical to a user, but where that user is not willing to pay for it. This is because the user selected it because it was free (as in freedom) and the user knows they do not have to cooperate with a market capture by a developer.
I can understand Oracle, but why Apache?
A huge part of the LibreOffice value proposition is price. And choosing free LibreOffice over paid Office is a lot easier than choosing a paid option. Once you open the conversation about paying, Office is a no-brainer and you need a compelling reason to switch to something else.
Thick? Stuff that runs in the browser definitely uses more memory and CPU cycles.
There's a huge difference in resources between XWindow servers and the new Electron based applications.
> For enterprise-class deployments, TDF has strongly recommended the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners – for desktop, mobile and cloud – with long-term support options, professional assistance, custom features and other benefits, including SLA (Service Level Agreements).
My company doesn't need this. We just need a program do open documents and spreadsheets. We don't need an ecosystem, we don't need their cloud, we don't need mobile suppoet, custom features, "professional assistance" or SLAs.
> Despite this recommendation, an increasing number of enterprises have chosen the version supported by volunteers over the version optimized for their needs.
Let that sink in for a second. Basically TDF is saying "we know what's best for you - it's paying us for things you don't need".
It's completely tone-deaf and I'm seriously considering creating a fork called FuckTDF-Suite with everything being identical except removing all mentions of "Community", "Enterprise", and donation prompts.
First Elastic, now this. If you're just salty about not getting money and don't care about the principles of free software, go sell your soul and work for M$FT or Goolag.
I've nothing against small groups doing a bit of guerrilla marketing, like one that showed up in a post share earlier this weekend along the lines of: "this program is shared under thr MIT and the GPL license but with the social expectation <something something>".
If we want to release out main product as open source we cannot expect to become wildly profitable, but at the same time we as developers should get better at advocating for such projects with our managers and our customers.
I often do that when there is something the company I work for need and depend on: I look for support contracts etc. Usually this works great, once devs ignored me and changed the rules after we signed up (handsontable I think), which is of course annoying.
The project provides an open source MS Office replacement for free, not an IT department.
Their community support forums are for home users, not the accounts department stuck trying to balance the end of year spreadsheet. Pay for their "enterprise" support if it is business critical, or buy MS Office and see how much end user support you get with that.
I hate to sound harsh, particularly when I've been benefiting from their work for years, but it's hard to imagine a workplace that would put up with those bugs.
Their own page says otherwise, too.
And when attempting to find this "enterprise" version, you have to go to one of their companies to get it... None of which provide prices, and only 1 of which I could find a "request" button to get a price.
This was a really dumb message.
If someone wants to know why businesses should prefer a non-community edition, are we supposed to link to a point-in-time relevant release notes blog post?
I’m personally very happy using the office tools bundled with MacOS.
Very few businesses stay away from proprietary software because of philosophical disagreements over licensing. Most just don’t want to spend money if they can get away with it.
Of course, we know that most businesses are not like this and do pay for perceived value. But I’m concerned that TDF are chasing a market that’s deeply reluctant to dig into its pockets.
2. if not the first part, second one would be kinda like how "enterprise" users get updates and "features" first and the "community" edition would get those as afterthought. This one is what collabora at least for what i know is doing for a long time with their customers but once the "business" version goes popular and the companies get more into serving these users, the "freeloaders" would be given less and less preference.
3. once companies like Collabora or others get "big enough", i see no problem for microsoft or other company to do "embrace, extend and extinguish" because that is essentially what collabora has done to libreoffice.
i think the second one or a combination of both would be the future of libroffice in my opinion from the stuff TDF is putting out.
Question: why is TDF a marketing machine for collabora and other companies?
Request Demo. Yeah, no. I'm not going to request a demo of a fucking office suite. I know how they work. Jesus.
I'm well aware that the consequence of nobody paying for this might mean feature development will vastly reduce and probably support will drop to a handful of people occasionally patching up and recompiling the same old software that has been more than good enough for the last decade. That's actually fine with me as I can't actually name a single thing they've added in the last 15 years that actually matters to me; at all.
To be clear, I'm so indifferent about office suites in general at this point that I haven't actually had a copy of LibreOffice on any of my computers in years. The need just never came up lately. And that would have been almost exclusively people emailing me stuff created with MS Office before that. Just not a thing any more. I also don't use any MS Office products. I seem to have been in companies that use Google Docs the last few years and I get by with the limited feature set provided by that. Their collaborative features are awesome though and a good reason to put up with their otherwise limited features. Office tools just no longer are the must have tool to have for people. And in so far they are, they are a worthless commodity.
In fact the opposite is true. Because “free” in English can be used both for freedom and for beer, the terms “libre” and “gratis” can be used to clarify what you’re talking about when you say “free”. Libre means freedom, as in liberty, and makes no reference to the price.
Of course LibreOffice is free of charge, and almost all open source software is, but the name definitely doesn’t imply it.
We WANT big companies to use LO, or anything else, simply so that it becomes acceptable and supported to do so, you freaking oafs.