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Comment by austincheney | Hacker News Reader

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.

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It is "properly licensed." That's the issue, and it's why LibreOffice has to beg instead of being able to sue.

If LibreOffice doesn't like this use, they can change to a less libre license. That's the point of proprietary and mixed licenses.

If LibreOffice does this, then the entire fork from Apache OpenOffice is fraudulent.

They just need to rename their community edition to "unsupported edition" or "insecure edition" or "we will leak your IP to china edition".

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?

Ethically who knows but you're definitely legally in the clear

"definitely"? you don't even know what country they're in

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.

Does it matter who pays for the hardware? I don't think that distinction is made by The Document Foundation.

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".

[1] https://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/licenses

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.

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