3 ms·

I don't know if this is permitted with the libre office license, but I wonder how much money it would take to just fork libreoffice and make a commercial produc

I don't know if this is permitted with the libre office license, but I wonder how much money it would take to just fork libreoffice and make a commercial product out of it.

senko 6y ago
Yes you can do that, here's one such commercial fork: https://www.collaboraoffice.com/solutions/collabora-office/ https://www.collaboraoffice.com/solutions/collabora-office/
weinzierl 6y ago
> ...and make a commercial product out of it. For that to be viable it would have to add a real benefit that people would be willing to pay for. Given that LibreOffice is the child of commercial software (StarOffice) that tried exactly this - at a time when the market for office software was much better - I have little hope for a commercial desktop office that is not Microsoft. Even for Microsoft the market for the desktop version seems to be dying. That doesn't mean that apparently some have made a profit from OpenOffice and LibreOffice. I haven't seen one in a while but for some time scams that tried to sell you an unmodified OpenOffice or LibreOffice on a subscription basis were quite common.
- toweringgoat 6y ago
  >> For that to be viable it would have to add a real benefit that people would be willing to pay for. does not necessarily mean: >> [I have little hope for a] commercial desktop office that is not Microsoft. Companies (and consumers) might have no reason to pay for the actual software itself, but they will pay for: - Support: where support is things like fixing bugs that are encountered, producing custom builds with cherry-picked bug fixes, etc. Also, more traditional support around getting it configured in your enterprise and/or migrating your enterprise to new software. - Feature development: so that the software does what they actually need. (Some places might do this in-house, but usually you'd just contract out to one of the companies that has developers with expertise in the codebase.) It's a mistake to think that money can only be made by selling a product. In the open source world you generally sell services (which is tough, but there are a few companies in this space).

I don't know if this is permitted with the libre office license, but I wonder how much money it would take to just fork libreoffice and make a commercial product out of it.

senko 6y ago

Yes you can do that, here's one such commercial fork: https://www.collaboraoffice.com/solutions/collabora-office/ https://www.collaboraoffice.com/solutions/collabora-office/

weinzierl 6y ago

> ...and make a commercial product out of it. For that to be viable it would have to add a real benefit that people would be willing to pay for. Given that LibreOffice is the child of commercial software (StarOffice) that tried exactly this - at a time when the market for office software was much better - I have little hope for a commercial desktop office that is not Microsoft. Even for Microsoft the market for the desktop version seems to be dying. That doesn't mean that apparently some have made a profit from OpenOffice and LibreOffice. I haven't seen one in a while but for some time scams that tried to sell you an unmodified OpenOffice or LibreOffice on a subscription basis were quite common.

toweringgoat 6y ago
>> For that to be viable it would have to add a real benefit that people would be willing to pay for. does not necessarily mean: >> [I have little hope for a] commercial desktop office that is not Microsoft. Companies (and consumers) might have no reason to pay for the actual software itself, but they will pay for: - Support: where support is things like fixing bugs that are encountered, producing custom builds with cherry-picked bug fixes, etc. Also, more traditional support around getting it configured in your enterprise and/or migrating your enterprise to new software. - Feature development: so that the software does what they actually need. (Some places might do this in-house, but usually you'd just contract out to one of the companies that has developers with expertise in the codebase.) It's a mistake to think that money can only be made by selling a product. In the open source world you generally sell services (which is tough, but there are a few companies in this space).