LibreOffice Might Delay Its "Personal Edition" Branding Or Change To "Community Edition"

[phoronix]

Phoronix: LibreOffice Might Delay Its "Personal Edition" Branding Or Change To "Community Edition"

In response to the largely critical feedback of LibreOffice 7.0-RC1's branding as "Personal Edition" for the standard version of this open-source office suite, the branding is being reconsidered to either delay it until LibreOffice 7.1 or potentially relabel it as the "Community Edition" version...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=LibreOffice-Personal-Undecided

[Danny3]

How about no branding or put the branding only on the Enterprise edition ?
I really don't like to see branding stuff or longer names than "Libre Office 7.0" on my desktop icons.
But if they really need to do this, "Community edition" sounds better to me.

[kescherPh]

put the branding only on the Enterprise edition

That seems like a sensible idea. After all, corps do like that fuzzy feeling of having an "Enterprise" label on the software they're running.

[skeevy420]

If y'all scroll down to pages 29 and 31 of their PDF you'll see their nefarious end-games here:

1. They want to charge companies and governments bulk subscription licenses
2. They want to license LO out to 3rd parties to get a "Powered by LibreOffice" badge like Chrome and Intel do.

So if you're a random Linux user at home or school it appears that nothing will change (at least in the short-term). To speculate, in the long-term I'd expect the Enterprise/Ecosystem version to start to include features to work with team members that the Community version may not have for a release or two like other projects that have free and non-free projects have.

[boxie]

If y'all scroll down to pages 29 and 31 of their PDF you'll see their nefarious end-games here:

1. They want to charge companies and governments bulk subscription licenses
2. They want to license LO out to 3rd parties to get a "Powered by LibreOffice" badge like Chrome and Intel do.

So if you're a random Linux user at home or school it appears that nothing will change (at least in the short-term). To speculate, in the long-term I'd expect the Enterprise/Ecosystem version to start to include features to work with team members that the Community version may not have for a release or two like other projects that have free and non-free projects have.

I personally have no problem with them making money. and if the "Enterprise Only" features just include support (and stuff to facilitate that) then again, I am happy.

[brent]

Developers are expensive and LibreOffice needs to somehow make money to pay them. There's nothing nefarious about it, but of course it's hard to find the right balance and a working business model.

I'm not sure how dire the situation is for LibreOffice, but it's possible that either LibreOffice will be able to successfully adopt a "freemium" model or the project will mostly shut down. Community is great, but you need a whole bunch of full-time developers for a large project like LibreOffice.

[eydee]

Oh, politics in the Linux ecosystem. Never happened before.

And no one's even questioning why they have a foundation and a board of directors (in plural) for a freaking text editor.

[kpedersen]

Developers are expensive and LibreOffice needs to somehow make money to pay them. There's nothing nefarious about it, but of course it's hard to find the right balance and a working business model.

Of course I agree with this however in practice they end up focusing more on features they can monetise (i.e features that are fairly useless for the community). For example they will jump head first into "cloud vaporware" and integration with other proprietary products. This means that features such as backwards compatibility and less common operating systems will take a back seat.

That said, it does make room for another project to emerge and I have never been particularly fond of Open/Libre Office. I personally am hoping lighter alternatives Abiword and Gnumeric can completely separate themselves from Gnome and see a little more development. They might then be able to step up to the plate as the defacto free productivity tools.

[Danielsan]

They could just have "LibreOffice" and "LibreOffice for enterprise" where trying to sell service around LO, like Collabora does. But starting to do difference between personal and enterprise is pretty malicious and unavoidable will bring to another fork where things are again clear.

[strtj]

And no one's even questioning why they have a foundation and a board of directors (in plural) for a freaking text editor.

If you think LibreOffice is just a text editor, you've clearly never used it.