Due to draft and development work in the area of branding and product naming, some speculation, in particular related to the “Personal Edition” tag shown in a LibreOffice 7.0 RC (Release Candidate), has started on several communication channels. So let us, as The Document Foundation’s Board of Directors, please provide further clarifications:
1. None of the changes being evaluated will affect the license, the availability, the permitted uses and/or the functionality. LibreOffice will always be free software and nothing is changing for end users, developers and Community members.
Basically, The Document Foundation intends to offer – through partners – professional paid-for support for LibreOffice to enterprise customers, and hence the tentative name to differentiate the LibreOffice we all know from the supported one.
The fact that LO is free, in binary form, is the reason half of the companies that use it, use it.
Trying to brand as “not for business use” (which is what this boils down to) will lose them that support, in favour of a few bucks in temporary corporate funding (which will dry up as the popularity drops)
So, how long till it forks, again?
Announcing ReallyFreeLibreOfficePromisePlusEdition
First of all I think no functionality will be lost, it will be the same project it has always been, it’s all about branding and about additional services most people won’t need.
Did The Document Foundation saw Canonical’s failed attempt to convert the RHEL business model to desktop OSes and thought they could do better converting the RHEL model to Office suites?
Last time I checked, the RHEL model for making money out of open source worked only for the market segments RHEL competes in. Whatever money Canonical makes from Ubuntu is from these market segments, not the desktop, which was always a Mark Shuttleworth pet project because it makes him feel like Steve Jobs.
Anyway, I wish them good luck. Actually I don’t. Desktop software should not need paid support, it should be easy to use enough to simply not need it. Paid support for desktop software a major moral hazzard, much like free-to-play. “Here is some free software, now pay us for support so you can make use of it, because we made it so you can’t use it without our support services”. I hope it never catches on.
Actually, what worked for Red Hat was going publicly traded. Just note that before the “broker experts” equated Red Hat with Linux there was a symbol on the market called LNUX (I wish I was making this stuff up). Btw, I was at LinuxWorld (not the good one, the one people know about) when Red Hat went public.
LNUX belonged to VA Linux Systems. A stock that rocketed because…. well hopefully you understand…
Btw, Canonical, a company built on massive money made in the (corrupt?) certificate generation market. Did not exist, wasn’t even a dream when this happened.
I’m not a stock trader, but know people in that arena (including my father, who lost quite a bit betting on LNUX … or Linux as he put it).
History is neither friend or foe, but knowing history helps.
Like it or not, Red Hat is still known in the trading world as the owners of Linux (at least with regards to where you can bet your money).
They’re not wrong. RH has the money to do what they want with the Linux ecosystem; they drive the bus for better or worse.
Paid support is fine, as long as there’s a healthy ecosystem.
The foundation’s actions, however, look to me to be an attempt to monopolize “Business Support”, which would be rather unhealthy. If this goes through, companies offering support for libreoffice that are not sanctioned will need to explain to businesses that they are not offering the “Business Edition”, despite the fee they charge.
They can always do their own builds from the same source code, removing the PE label and distribute that to customers. Which proves that they’re _able_ to do their own builds which is a requirement to be able to provide more support than “is the device powered on” and “I’ll forward the bug report to the issue tracker”. I’d expect more than that from business support.
Paid support for desktop software is not fine. If a piece of desktop software needs paid support, it sucks, plain and simple. And if it sucks, it either gets returned with the hardware it came with or gets unceremoniously uninstalled.
I will make an exception for super-niche software, but not for an Office suite or a desktop OS.
kurkosdr,
I disagree, that comes off sounding very entitled. Sure I get that paying for support sucks & is inconvenient, and a lot of people won’t pay a cent for it. Many FOSS users choose to self-support, which is fine, but realistically not all FOSS projects have the means to provide commercial quality support for free. Not all projects have wealthy benefactors providing free resources & support to the community. That’s the thing with software, a lot of people expect all this work and support for free, but as an indy developer who isn’t independently wealthy, it’s tough to make an honest living this way.
Entitled or not, that’s how the market works when it comes to desktop software. People expect stuff to “just work” and enhance their lives. If they need to face a problem and contact support, much less pay for support, the desktop software in question has failed. Non-IT people hate discovering problems in software period, so trying to sell support to them, which assumes they will be facing several problems they can’t solve themselves or other show-stopper issues regularly enough to warrant the purchase, starts the business-customer relationship on the wrong foot entirely.
It’s why FOSSIes hate Apple more than they hate Microsoft. Apple has put such an emphasis on “just works” on their marketing and it has resonated so well with the buying public (for whatever reason) that trying to sell support for desktop software is like trying to sell bottled air.
And you know what? I like it that way. Screw that nonsense where software is put out there “for free” irresponsibly. I want free support on a paid product.
kurkosdr,
You are entitled to your opinion, however there are plenty of us who do use and prefer it. It is our opinion that the commercial software falls short. Not for nothing, but most of us FOSS users were actually commercial users first and feel that at some point the commercial developers are putting out products that turn us away. I was solidly in the windows camp and I have no regrets leaving windows for linux. I’m not some fanatic who denies all issues with linux, but it was the right decision for me,
We can state our opinions, but it makes no sense to argue over them. With this in mind I’m not trying to question your opinion, only point out that not everyone agrees, that’s how the market works 🙂
Hmm, I don’t think that’s actually true. There was a time when apple computers were most popular computers at linux user groups. One of my roommates preferred to run gentoo linux on his MBP. To each their own I say 🙂
There’s a sort of logic to it though. Hardware from more popular manufacturers tends to be better supported by open source devs because it’s more popular. If you buy random windows computers to run linux, you take a greater risk of things not working because developers haven’t reverse engineered it to work with linux. These days you have some more options like system76 to get official support, which is good if you can afford it. Also keep in mind there was a time when apple laptops were better than they are today.
Obviously not everyone is pleased with apple’s quality. Apple’s push to have ultra sleek devices has compromised quality, functionality, performance, serviceability, etc in ways that are disappointing to some. I’ve been to mac shops where they were complaining about it internally.
More power to you, Seriously everyone should do whatever works best for
them. Just don’t expect it to be the same for everyone.
Why do you think companies keep IT people on staff? XD
One way or another people pay for access to knowledge so they can do their jobs, which is most likely something not related to technology, and get on with their lives. We live in a world where people have specialized job skills, and we trade money to get access to those skills.
You’re also not taking into account the complexity of today’s systems, especially end user stuff.
“Why do you think companies keep IT people on staff? XD”
To take care of server software and set up desktop systems according to business needs. If your IT staff needs to go around fixing problematic of hard-to-use software, you are throwing money away, get better software.
kurkosdr,
As always, the answer is “it depends”. A lot of businesses have moved to the web such that the OS is kind of irrelevant. Some corporate environments are setup to run thin clients, my wife’s job for example. And we shouldn’t discount the fact that often times microsoft itself is guilty of pushing unwanted changes that incur additional training/support costs. Excel used to be my favorite software but IMHO microsoft’s actually made it worse over the years to the point where I find LO to be more consistent.
I was an MS exchange administrator for years and let me tell you it wasn’t a walk in the park, that sh*t was a mess.
Again, the main takeaway shouldn’t be that there’s one right and wrong answer, but that all software has it’s pros and cons. Individual preferences and needs ultimately determine suitability better than blanket statements. In short, I’m not trying to convince you that your preferences are wrong, but would you be willing to agree that your preferences don’t apply to everyone and are not universal?
Large enterprises prefer to have technical/customer support if they are going to deploy a software package across the entire business.
“a major moral hazzard” ?
Really ? I think not even Richard M. Stallman would say that.
LibreOffice is doing something where Microsoft probably had 100s of or maybe 1000 developers work on.
LibreOffice is still adding features. It’s not just developers on their own time submitting some bug fixes. I wonder how you think developers/companies working on the code should get paid ?
This is part of an article from Linux Weekly News:
“[..] nearly 70% of the changes to LibreOffice come from developers paid by “ecosystem companies”; those companies pay about 40 people to work on LibreOffice. That is not a small expense; the companies involved will only be able to sustain that level of development if LibreOffice is bringing in a corresponding amount of revenue.
In a lengthy post titled “Some problems”, project co-founder Michael Meeks explained that this revenue is not coming in. Part of the problem is that Microsoft provides “poor to non-existent support to the majority of users” of Office, he said, so nobody thinks in terms of buying support for any office suite:
It is routinely the case that I meet organizations that have deployed free LibreOffice without long term support, with no security updates etc. Try the Cabinet Office in the UK (at the center of UK Government), or a large European Gov’t Department I recently visited – 15,000 seats – with some great FLOSS enthusiasm, but simply no conceptual frame that deploying un-supported FLOSS in the enterprise hurts the software that they then rely on.
Companies think of LibreOffice, he said, in the same way that they think about web browsers, which are available for free and are well supported. But work on web browsers is paid for by advertising, which is not a model that works for an office suite.
The problem is compounded by companies that sell inexpensive “support” for LibreOffice, but which are not involved in its development and are not really able to provide that support. Those companies “file all their tickets up-stream and hope they are fixed for free”. Companies working in that mode have no problem pricing their offerings below those of the companies doing the actual work (and thus winning much of the business that does exist). In addition, they simply call their offerings “LibreOffice”, which actually looks more authentic than services from other companies, which are trying to build their own brands around LibreOffice support.”
This is something also clearly written in the website:
https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/
and should not be a surprise. If you run a business and libreoffice is a tool you rely on,
you want to have something more than just a good enough office, for free.
If you can’t afford, or your business is in trouble, or you don’t understand how
a malfunction can cost you, and you’re putting your business in trouble.
So that’s a good news, let’s only hope they will not mess up with the naming
and the message, and that community of user will use brain and will not waste
energy trying to bash, fork or go against one of the biggest successful examples
of end users relevant opensource cross OS project because they don’t
understand that there are no free lunches, and that business needs more
than single users.
Then there is LibreOffice Online (https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/) which is meant to compete with Google Docs and MS Office 365 Online.
This could be a way to differentiate and to keep people from going down the rabbit hole of setting up LibreOffice Online when they want just LibreOffice.
They figured out community driven FOSS is dead, and anyone capable of contributing will get a job?
My guess is LibreOffice is going to become an umbrella brand with various sub projects focused on productivity applications and groupware. Modern productivity suites aren’t just a word processor and spreadsheet application; they have an ecosystem of applications to allow collaboration between team members and secure remote work.
They already have LibreOffice Online thanks to Collabora (https://www.collaboraoffice.com/).
Now they need SharePoint, Outlook, and Keynote Live equivalents. Maybe they can pick up Zimbra as their exchange competitor.
Hopefully, they can gets a revenue stream going. I like Calc, and it would be nice if Base would become a serious Access replacement. Those two would be killer applications. Excel is probably the most important part of MS Office, after Outlook, and there are a lot of Access refugees.