I'm an engineer (not software, not a developer, not in "tech") and we have been switching a lot of our workflows to open source software and the like. This isn'

I'm an engineer (not software, not a developer, not in "tech") and we have been switching a lot of our workflows to open source software and the like. This isn't because we have a "free" or "libre" fetish, it's more that the open source technologies tend to plug and play better with others, have open standards for file formats etc., and we can have clients and collaborators work on any OS they want. I don't think Collabora is going to be alone in their struggles with this type of business model. From what I can see / understand is that there a few large corporations / govts whatever you like that provide financial support in the form of the Pareto distribution. One or two organizations provide the majority of support (85%+). What this usually means is that the organization(s) pays for support, has the company like Collabora write all the code, and in the end they just take what they want and either re-implement it in a different way or actually have a whole different product than the "public" one. This has a double-edge effect; the few organization who pay for all the time for programmers implement the features they want (why not? they foot the bill) and the developers end up building a product that may or may not be good for the rest of the users. Case in point with LibreOffice and Collabora. Collabora pushes most all the commits, yet they are an online version of an office suite to plugin to Nextcloud, etc. To be honest, LibreOffice should be charging for their product. I'm not sure how they would or what the mechanism would be, but it's great software and has $ value.