Document Foundation starts charging €8.99 for 'free' LibreOffice
theregister.com
theregister.com
I see everyday University's and companies laboratories and offices paying tens of thousands of dollars for proprietary software a year. It is not unreasonable to pay hundreds or thousands for OSS if with that you support development on the free.
I remember buying physical media to get my first distros of Linux. The source was open but the builds/dists were what I was paying for.
Open source doesn't mean free distributions/builds or free support.
If you look at the open source definition[1] it has to do with the source and what you can do with it. The key theme here is the source itself.
I've spent a significant amount of my time around open source and having a healthy functional ecosystem of people around it is important. For that to happen you have to solve for the financial parts.
Note, I'm not endorsing or rejecting this document foundation move. I've not thought about it enough to do so.
It’s even (still) in their guidelines [1]!
E.g. the GPL mandates not "you will make the source freely available", it mandates "you will make the source available to everyone who receives the software".
Furthermore, the Document Foundation will still be offering free downloads of LO for macOS, they just add another way of getting it that does cost money.
That is not required by the GPL, you only have to distribute source to people you distribute binaries to. Those people can decide to redistribute it (or not) to anyone (including upstream) of course, and they are bound by the same terms as you are.
Roughly speaking, with GPL binaries can cost someone money but source code is always free of charge.
The box set even came with a book.
Obviously for small contributions, e.g. writing or updating a bug report, or fixing some trivial one-line bug, the amount is insignificant and not worth thinking about. I'm thinking more about larger contributions - extra features, tricky bugs, etc - stuff that takes weeks or months to develop. You can expect outside contributors to want some guarantee of getting paid for large contributions if you're a project that is actively monetised in some way, even if the software is also available completely for free.
Users buying LibreOffice on the Mac App Store are not going to be doing so because they care about free software – if they did they probably wouldn't be on a Mac and would probably download from official channels, perhaps donating directly if they want to contribute so that Apple don't take 30%.
This means that those users buying it are users who would otherwise buy/use iWork, Microsoft Office, or Google Docs, and I'm pretty sure they're going to be in for a bit of a shock. LibreOffice is usable, but it's not the same in terms of usability.
So, they're about to get a bunch of users who stumble onto their software, pay for it, have a bad experience, and then expect and are essentially entitled to customer support. Customer support through the App Store is hard at the best of times, so good luck. I somehow doubt the Document Foundation has factored this in to their pricing, or that they even have a customer support team.
The code is open, so anyone can compile it for free, and when enough people care, any of them with a bit of free time is permitted to distribute builds, like people do for Ungoogled Chromium.
Also, the teams and organizations that create Free Software are often non-profit organizations and volunteers, where customer care and market analysis is nonexistent.
The idea of selling free software is something that I see a lot in theory but almost never in practice. Sometimes I think it was just Stallman preaching what was applicable in his time bit it's not realistic in today's world.
There are a TON of open source projects I would be willing to support with corporate money if I could charge it as a "Sale" to my corp card, or invoice it as a "software sale" not a "Donation to a non-profit"
I need no approval to buy software, I need approval to donate company money.
The problem with this approach is that a lot of open source software is internationally developed, and it creates a two tier class of developers: those who can benefit from the customer payments and those who (have to) work on the software on their own time with no material benefits. As soon as you introduce financial benefit into any kind of organizations, power balances and group dynamics will always massively change, which often enough then leads into forks, splits or in the worst case in lawsuits (e.g. about trademarks).
It becomes particularly complex if the developers are outside of the US and EEA legal areas: dealing with non-profits or international payments/employment is pretty much a settled thing there. But for developers outside these areas, there are a host of issues, some of which delve deep into uncharted legal territory: how to employ them, do you need fixed contracts or project-based ones, which taxes and how much apply, how to pay bribes (in some lesser developed countries, that is absolutely necessary to get permit applications processed), how to get any money transferred in the first place, are sanctions at play (e.g. the US sanctions Cuba, the EU does not, or the entire clusterfuck regarding Russia)...
https://www.ringerhq.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32764701 https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/Resources#freelanc...
The main difficulties are that you have to provide some value/convenience (e.g. see krita on steam) and that if you mess up your project people might actually leave. For instance if the new MS office is dramatically worse people will drag their feet but will eventually buy it anyway, but when people did not like the direction of openoffice they did not stand for it and made libreoffice.
I mean they could come with an (enterprise) cloud offering or consultancy, but it would need a lot of infrastructure and development.
Whoever forks and distributes it for free needs to set up the infrastructure, websites, community forums etc etc. It is not cheap in both money and man-hours.
Adding to that, they need to have the persistence to continue running and maintain the fork for years to come.
Office 365 has made it so Libre is the clear winner in UX for most of my users last 5 years, honestly.
My gut feeling is that most people mostly like their documents just being everywhere and being accessible everywhere. Office 365 storing things in the cloud, that's pretty much the case, you don't really need to understand where a file is (it's "in Office") or how to move them. Another bonus is not having to worry about what's been deleted. It's only based on anecdotes, but I suspect this is a lot more important to people than most other aspects of the software.
This is not a good thing at all, as it's creating a form of indoctrination to learned helplessness that isn't easy to get past. At least nowhere near as easy as it was in the past.
While I personally think a filesystem has great UX for my purposes, never accidentally losing a file is a much better UX for most people. As much as it causes friction to not have these basic computer skills now, I suspect it's less "illiteracy" and more _progress_. We don't criticise people for not knowing how to ride a horse today, because we have public transport and cars. We don't criticise computer users who can't use a 5.4" floppy drive because we have USB sticks and cloud storage.
What’s a “basic computing concept” anyway? My 4 year old granddaughter doesn’t know a bit from a byte or a file from a folder, but was able to pick up an iPad and intrinsically start using it to do far more powerful things than I would have been able to do at 4 years old on a IBM Model 370 back in the 70s
For example, the Mozilla Public License used by LibreOffice is neither free in the way of the GPL, nor free in the way of BSD or MIT...MPL lives in a middle ground between as--in-beer and as-in-freedom.
Personally, convenience is one of the reasons I run LibreOffice on Windows. Sure, all things being equal, I would rather not pay for Office. And all things being equal, I would rather use non-proprietary software.
Of course all things are never equal. And one of my personal turnoffs is managing the type of subscriptions, upgrades, etc. that are inevitable with proprietary software these days...Stay-off-my-lawn [redacted].
The MPL, GPL, and BSD licenses are all free as in freedom and generally free as in free beer, though as this article shows they don't have to be. They have different limitations, but let's not add another three more definitions to the already overworked word "free."
The GPL is copyleft, the BSD license is permissive, and the MPL is in between.
The strength of projects like LibreOffice is not that they are monetarily free (Google Docs exists), but that the source code is open.
Edit: That being said, I welcome the additional of an optional charge.
Or do you mean that the jump to start charging is the big decision, not the amount?
That's a cop-out. I guarantee they already get at least $99/year via donations by macOS users. If they wanted to charge directly, $0.99 would easily cover those fees, assuming 130 people buy it per year.
The reality is that they want to get some money back, and that's ok. Using the Apple fees as an excuse isn't necessary.
Really? How?
LibreOffice is free as in beer. Not only the source, but also the binaries, and also for MacOs, are distributed for free. You can just go to the download page and grab it.
The only thing thats being charged is going through the App Store. If this really 'backfires' as some people seem to suggest, I think the project is better off just abandoning the App Store.
Publishing your program on the App Store makes it convenient for the user to keep it in sync and updated, but it costs the publisher money. LibreOffice sure needs a bit of funding (like Anki) so I'm totally for putting it up for sale.
Let's also not forget that the App Store is a proprietary platform, meaning that publishing a FOSS program vs. a proprietary one is pretty much the same since you can only distribute binaries. Sure, you can download the source and install it on your machine if you want to pay $0, but you can already do exactly that by going to the developer's website and downloading the .DMG installer.
What we found out with Spotif, Netflix, ... is that people are willing to pay for a convenient access to media. They could get the same content on pirate websites but it takes a while and there are some risks associated with it.
This dynamic probably also true for software distribution channels. Users can download and compile the source, and side-load it on their phone. It's just more complicated and you don't get automated updates anymore.
The main blocker right now is that people are used of getting things for free. Changing that social contract is going to be difficult.
"Oh its only available in another region".
"Oh it got pulled from Netflix".
Providers introducing Ads will make it worse.
> ... willing to pay for convenient access ...
Convenience as a monetization idea should be considered by more open-source devs: binaries compiled for various OS version, optional cloud compute/storage (e.g. Zotero), prioritized assistance (e.g. Tailscale), etc.
> [...] people are used of getting things for free. Changing that social contract is going to be difficult.
Society has to gotten used to paying for people's time & expertise in many conventional areas (e.g. healthcare, education, legal advice, food) but still aren't used to paying for open-source work they consume.
The only issue is with corporate entities struggling to turn OSS into exploitable monopolies and control points. That's just not how OSS works. Companies that try to get creative with license restrictions, simply end up destroying their OSS communities. Community is conditional on the ability to actually use the resulting software and receiving a license to do so. That's what OSS is. People/companies contribute for free on the condition that the resulting software is free for them and others to use. It's a simple deal. You break it, people walk away. Your share holders are not our problem; but your problem.
Nothing wrong with closed source where you sell a license. If that's what you want to do as a company, that's what you do. And then people either buy it or not. Most of us are probably involved with some for-profit software company. I know I am.
The issue with Libreoffice is that it is open source and third parties can undercut the price set by the Document Foundation. by simply releasing it themselves.
Oracle found out the hard way that trying to "own" OSS doesn't work with Java, Mysql, Hudson, Open Office and a few other things they got out of the Sun acquisition. Other companies just took the source code and rolled their own builds and started distributing them. In the case of some of these products, Oracle used the trademark to insist on controlling distribution and actual forks and renames happened instead. Oracle lost control over the projects they inherited.
But for better or for worse, OpenJDK can be gotten from several sources and Oracle has largely given up trying to monetize distribution (you can still pay them for a Oracle produced build if you insist, but few people do), Jenkins continues to thrive, MariaDB and other databases are doing great, and indeed Libre Office is shipping as part of several linux distributions as the surviving & more successful fork of Open Office (which still exists as an Apache Project).
Good open source tends to survive the corporate entities it comes from. Sun Microsystems is long gone and absorbed into Oracle. But we still have the source code. And kudos to them creating/acquiring all the wonderful software I mentioned in this comment. They failed as a company but their software legacy is still powering our industry today. That's how good OSS works.
So the Document Foundation is well within their rights to try to charge for the software they steward but don't own. You can always build and distribute your own builds. For free. That's what the license says. Nobody is under any obligation to actually hand over their cash. They seem to have an existential problem in terms of their financing.
You can argue that the Document Foundation also tries to make some profit but I would expect that it's in the spirit of allowing more contributors to be able to work on the project full time instead of lining the pockets of the shareholders. It's still a social good.
We can't start making up freedoms whenever we're annoyed. Free beer has never been part of the equation, explicitly.
> The issue with Libreoffice is that it is open source and third parties can undercut the price set by the Document Foundation. by simply releasing it themselves.
It's going to be hard to undercut €8.99, with the guarantees of authenticity and being current that you're going to get from the Document Foundation. There will, of course, be a free place (or more than one free place) to download it, but the site will be so ugly that only techies will know to trust it. And if there were a free version in the Mac app store competing with the Document Foundation version, it would be very suspicious.
Also, it's important for everyone in FOSS to charge Apple owners. They're rich and can afford it.
I remember that it used to be tough (10+ years ago) to find a compiled version of GIMP for Windows without paying. I thought it was a good thing, and still do.
> The only issue is with corporate entities struggling to turn OSS into exploitable monopolies and control points.
The GPL guards against this, so copyleft is an option if you don't want to do free work for giant corporations (without them having to do free work for you.) This won't defend you against the efficient provision of your application as a service, but maybe if your application can be delivered like that, consider going lightly proprietary. You're not going to outcompete FAANG in providing web services.
I feel this should be turned into a meme or something.
It's very easy to undercut 8.99. Just compile the binary once and distribute it via any of a wide variety of download services. The marginal cost of that is close to zero when amortized over lots of users. So close that it might as well be zero.
"important for everyone in FOSS to charge Apple owners"
OK, thanks for making my point for me.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/280680/Krita/
and I'm sure there are plenty of other examples around too.
> [...] only when sold via Apple's Mac App Store.
Tried the Mac version a while ago. Looks horribly out of place, and it struggled to update the (retina resolution) screen with only a blank document open. That was a known bug but deemed unimportant...
Totally fine by me and I ended up buying it there for the auto updates.
I guess the official release is meant to appeal to such use case and profit from direct monetary contribution to the project. I hope collabora played it fair an square and contributed to upstream, but an official release is a good way to ensure no middle party can cash in for a minimal packaging effort.
If things work out ok with it, then it'll be a useful revenue stream for them to build further Community enhancing things. Hopefully. :)
They knew well ahead that Apple would take a 30% cut so I don't understand why some commenters are saying about why this is a "problem."
I'd prefer the money goes to the Document Foundation, who already need to pay to use the app store. It's not a major issue, but it's a downside to the decision in my eyes.
There's a bunch of other related costs associated with commerce on apps. This is why some developers don't "charge" for apps or don't setup their own storefronts. Take credit card charge-backs or fraud disputes. By going through the Apple Storefront, Document Foundation is outsourcing that headache to Apple.
You know what also solves that headache? Offering a cost free download of your software. Like LibreOffice already does for MacOS, which they say is the recommended source for all users.
Open source has been driven by quite a vocal community of "stick it to the man" generation of freetards who live by the faux-arguments that:
(a) "because its open source it must be better"
(b) "X is free, so why should anybody pay EvilCorp for a license ?"
The Open Source community has effectively won its own race to the bottom and its going to be tough if not impossible to reverse that trend. Especially as the open source community also bitches and moans about any sort of restrictive license.
Don't misunderstand me, I understand the arguments for seeking to charge for open source. I'm just saying there's a genie that needs to be put back in its bottle somehow....
Libre != Gratis, as any speaker of a romance language could tell you.
The free software (not "open source") community has always and forever been crystal-clear about this: Free software is about freedom, not zero price.
> LibreOffice that literally shout FREE in their own product name
I do not understand the point you are trying to make here. You were complaining about how English-speaking people misunderstand the word "free", but for "libre" there isn't this ambiguity?
I would of course prefer it if people could pay what they want (or if they linked to the gratis version), since there might be folks stuck on macOS and that don't have spare cash this week to pay for LibreOffice.
They could have won the Roll Royce in a competition. They may have a medical need for that champagne.
Ultimately in any of those scenarios we are talking first world poor, so the amount is relatively still small.
Further if they're 'working poor' that can afford Mac's, maybe they aren't that poor? Or if they are they obviously haven't got their priorities straight, and once you get to the point of saying society should help people on low incomes because they buy a Mac instead of food or some other nice thing they might spend their disposable income on, then you've lost me for one.
Edit: I really thought you were being sarcastic in your first reply. Now I'm not so sure? I really can't see how that's a legitimate pov. If I buy cheaper less processed food am I being discriminated against because I have to spend more time peeling my own potatoes? If I buy a cheaper car with a smaller engine do I get discriminated against because I have to press the accelerator harder and change gears more?
Poorer people have less money. Cheaper things tend to be less convenient than more expensive things. That's just how it works. It's not discrination, it's economics.
They would need to charge something to cover those costs.
All this does is make Apple Richer with the 30% tax.
Can I also host Libre office on appstore?
Nowadays I would buy MS Office just because it looks eye-candy but they have seemingly abandoned selling classic Office versions. I absolutely refuse to use software that requires me to sign-in with an online account.
s/LibreOffice/Google Docs Editors/