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LibreOffice tells businesses: Get off Community version, you are hurting devs

zdnet.com

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Re: LibreOffice tells businesses: Get off Community version, you are hurting devs

#61

Post by MikusR »

2Gkashmiri wrote: post #25
himujjal wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 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…

i am at -2 votes right now... did i say something bad? i'm still trying to understand what makes HN crowd mad

It's not the HN crowd. It's more likely people from those commercial LibreOffice vendors and they sock-puppets.

Re: LibreOffice tells businesses: Get off Community version, you are hurting devs

#62

Post by snicker7 »

howfoss wrote: post #17
austincheney wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is 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.

It is "properly licensed." That's the issue, and it's why LibreOffice has to beg instead of being able to sue. If LibreOffice doesn't like this use, they can change to a less libre license. That's the point of proprietary and mixed licenses.

They just need to rename their community edition to "unsupported edition" or "insecure edition" or "we will leak your IP to china edition".

Re: LibreOffice tells businesses: Get off Community version, you are hurting devs

#63

Post by buovjaga »

MikusR wrote: post #60
buovjaga wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> During this time, I learned that all the "donations" to tdf are used for "conferences and shit" I am paid by TDF to onboard new contributors. I think it is going rather well, with many FOSS outsiders being lured in. Conference expenses are a small part of the budget. A software project is much more than pure development.

So you are paid to lure people to do free work for commercial companies?

That is a weird way of referring to value being collectively added to a free software project. I contributed to LibreOffice for five years before being hired. I even did onboarding without compensation, with increasing intensity and regularity. I quite happily worked alongside people employed by various companies and I learned a lot.

Re: LibreOffice tells businesses: Get off Community version, you are hurting devs

#64

Post by 2Gkashmiri »

lumost wrote: post #44
2Gkashmiri wrote: post #2

This 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 nee…

out of curiosity, why do you use an open source office product when a variety of free & high quality web based document editors exist? I chafe when I need to use the microsoft office suite at this point, and premium editors look more like grammarly than word. In the corporate/business use case there are both open source and cheap licensed/self-hosted versions of web based editors.

can you link open source web based editors? i have a need to use excel/spreadsheets

Re: LibreOffice tells businesses: Get off Community version, you are hurting devs

#65

Post by pacamara619 »

SloopJon wrote: post #24

I 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/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.

From their blog:

> For enterprise-class deployments, TDF has strongly recommended the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners – for desktop, mobile and cloud – with long-term support options, professional assistance, custom features and other benefits, including SLA (Service Level Agreements).

My company doesn't need this. We just need a program do open documents and spreadsheets. We don't need an ecosystem, we don't need their cloud, we don't need mobile suppoet, custom features, "professional assistance" or SLAs.

> Despite this recommendation, an increasing number of enterprises have chosen the version supported by volunteers over the version optimized for their needs.

Let that sink in for a second. Basically TDF is saying "we know what's best for you - it's paying us for things you don't need".

It's completely tone-deaf and I'm seriously considering creating a fork called FuckTDF-Suite with everything being identical except removing all mentions of "Community", "Enterprise", and donation prompts.

First Elastic, now this. If you're just salty about not getting money and don't care about the principles of free software, go sell your soul and work for M$FT or Goolag.

Re: LibreOffice tells businesses: Get off Community version, you are hurting devs

#66

Post by 2Gkashmiri »

buovjaga wrote: post #59
2Gkashmiri wrote: post #2

This 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 nee…

> During this time, I learned that all the "donations" to tdf are used for "conferences and shit" I am paid by TDF to onboard new contributors. I think it is going rather well, with many FOSS outsiders being lured in. Conference expenses are a small part of the budget. A software project is much more than pure development.

why isnt TDF hiring actual programmers? why are you looking for outside volunteer help when you can do programming in house? its not like TDF is cash strapped or anything?

or does leadership at TDF have that mozilla ceo style BS mindset (paying herself millions of dollars salary while laying off actual developers because of cash issues)

Re: LibreOffice tells businesses: Get off Community version, you are hurting devs

#67

Post by toast0 »

lumost wrote: post #44
2Gkashmiri wrote: post #2

This 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 nee…

out of curiosity, why do you use an open source office product when a variety of free & high quality web based document editors exist? I chafe when I need to use the microsoft office suite at this point, and premium editors look more like grammarly than word. In the corporate/business use case there are both open source and cheap licensed/self-hosted versions of web based editors.

I prefer a local spreadsheet over a browser spreadsheet, because the browser spreadsheets don't always update all the dependent cells consistently. Sometimes, they need to send something back and forth to a server and that's slow and irritating. Resizing columns seems better in a local app than in a browser too, but I'm not totally sure about that.

I don't really use a word processor or other parts of an office suite very often.

Re: LibreOffice tells businesses: Get off Community version, you are hurting devs

#68

Post by 2Gkashmiri »

i 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?

Re: LibreOffice tells businesses: Get off Community version, you are hurting devs

#70

Post by jillesvangurp »

Libreoffice 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.

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