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LibreOffice tells businesses: Get off Community version, you are hurting devs
- cosmotic 6y agoOh my, that stock art: White-on-black code printout being written on with a black pen.
- Brian_K_White 6y agoWay 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.
- mbrodersen 6y agoWhy on earth would anybody pay for LibreOffice? The only advantage it has is being free. I only reluctantly use it because of that.
- mbrodersen 6y agoIf 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.
- fito 6y agoBasically, LibreOffice hit this problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem
- 2Gkashmiri 6y agoThis was bound to happen and I feel sad. 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.
- himujjal 6y agoI 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. I know PDF is by adobe and Docx is by microsoft.
- codegladiator 6y agohttps://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-microsoft-office-file-formats-so-complicated-and-some-workarounds/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/02/19/why-are-the-micros...
- moron4hire 6y agoThat's not about docx.
- EwanToo 6y agoI think the single biggest thing that OpenOffice achieved was the ODT file format. 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
- 2Gkashmiri 6y agoi am at -2 votes right now... did i say something bad? i'm still trying to understand what makes HN crowd mad
- jshevek 6y agoThis can be hard to predict, but the following is sometimes helpful: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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- gabereiser 6y agoWhy would a business get off community edition with LibreOffice? If they wanted to pay for office, wouldn’t they just go Microsoft? I get that they want funds to develop LibreOffice but it’s not like the money is being spent on development at all.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mgbmtl 6y agoDon't partners like Collabora hire devs? "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."
- gabereiser 6y agoRed 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.
- detaro 6y agoWhy 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.
- fencepost 6y agoCollabora 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.
- hirundo 6y agoMost 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?
- austincheney 6y agoIs 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.
- hirundo 6y agoNo 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?
- howfoss 6y agoEthically who knows but you're definitely legally in the clear
- jodrellblank 6y ago"definitely"? you don't even know what country they're in
- bartvk 6y agoYou'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."
- cs702 6y ago> ...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/ 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 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 https://numfocus.org/sponsors Can Libreoffice become a critical piece of underlying infrastructure, atop which businesses can build new products and services?
- joemazerino 6y agoNo 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.
- hakfoo 6y agoLibreOffice 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.
- nprateem 6y agoWell 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.
- jrh206 6y agoPrompted 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 eventually search for 'business' on the LibreOffice website, and found this article: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/ 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.
- gnfargbl 6y agoI 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.
- Closi 6y agoAbsolutely - 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.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- SloopJon 6y agoI 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! https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2021/02/03/libreoffice-7-1-community/ 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.
- indymike 6y agoA couple of thoughts: 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.
- andi999 6y agoSo what's the price tag?
- Simulacra 6y agoThere's a business version??
- aidenn0 6y agoTFA mentions two partners that sell versions for the enterprise (Collabora and Red Hat).
- xen2xen1 6y agoProbably a little too bit conspiratorial, but anyone wonder if Redhat had something to do with this? This sounds oddly like the Centos announcement recently.
- ropeladder 6y agoNewer 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.
- mbrodersen 6y agoAgree. I gave up using LibreOffice for anything but simple text documents. And carefully avoid using undo.
- wccrawford 6y agohttps://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/frequently-asked-questions/#usebusiness https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/frequently-asked-questi... 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.
- AnonC 6y agoIt’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?
- jtdev 6y agoI’m a big supporter and user of open source software, but I must say the office suite open source world seems like a real shit show. I’m personally very happy using the office tools bundled with MacOS.
- crnamafija 6y agoHere I am just using Apple Pages and not worrying about anything else.
- signal11 6y agoTo 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.
- 2Gkashmiri 6y agoi 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?
- renewiltord 6y agoBro. It's an office suite. If I can't self serve, then I'm not going to use it. Request Demo. Yeah, no. I'm not going to request a demo of a fucking office suite. I know how they work. Jesus.
- jillesvangurp 6y agoLibreoffice 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.
- hnarn 6y ago> 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.
- throwawaymanbot 6y agoWhat has libreoffice become? This is going on all over the FOSS world.