LibreOffice tells businesses: Get off Community version, you are hurting devs
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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?
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.
We WANT big companies to use LO, or anything else, simply so that it becomes acceptable and supported to do so, you freaking oafs.
I’m personally very happy using the office tools bundled with MacOS.