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

[Spacefish]

Time for another Fork?!
Call it "FreeOffice" this time?

[lyamc]

Monetization of LibreOffice means that enterprise customers can get priority support for compatibility with Microsoft's own stuff, while also allowing all users to benefit from it.

[grok]

Here's my submission on the referenced TDF / LO blog page:



I was even quoted by the subsequent poster, yay! Now if the TDF / LO board would just read it and take it to heart...

I like "Standard Edition" in this context, it would mean that at least I probably didn't get the wrong version. Just "LibreOffice" is good also ; "Standard Edition" or (Standard Edition) might be restricted to the about dialog or the official website and then there's the question what package managers may do.

"Personal" is perhaps the worst since some people will wonder if it's illegal to use in a non-profit organization, in a company or even to send a church newsletter and so on.

[gregzeng]

Standard governance issues again. We are all born small minded. No governance issues at all. Then we discover the complexities of the big world, with crazy innovations everywhere. How to materially support these innovators. Religion, or selfish greed? So we get the Open Source "religion" that no one understands, versus the closed source tyrannies.
Senior managers here know that blind faith (religion) is not logical nor sensible usually. So then we invent things like Linux, The Linux Foundation, the Open Inventions Network, United Nations, World Health Organization, GNOME, Debian, ISO - International Organization for Standardization, etc. Academics, politicians, journalists, are still debating the codes behind these "open source" attempts.
The Libreoffice code is similar to most other world engineering efforts. Privateers, governments, groups of every kind, venture capitalists, etc are cooperating, tricking or competing with each other, as usual. Assemblies of these people, groups & corporations appear, change & disappear. The standard "laws" of evolution" are at work as usual.
Examining my database for Windows for Office suites, the 17+ competitors to LibreOffice are many. None of them are updated as frequently. Sometimes they claim selling points not in LibreOffice. Aws Workspaces, Calligra Suite, Collabora Office, Corel, Freeoffice, Google G-suite, Kingsoft Office, Libre Office, Microsoft, Onlyoffice, Openoffice, Polaris Office, Ssuite, Synology, Wps Office, X-libreoffice, Zoho.

[NotMine999]

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.

Sounds like the LO folks are taking a page out of the Qt licensing playbook.

Sadly, it sounds like LO and Qt are using the same marketing methods and-or firms.

In other words, LO pulled a Qt-like "aim-fire-shoot" mistake. Elsewhere in these forums you'll find the verbal assault that Qt took for it's real or imagined licensing changes to future releases. The LO and TDF folks appear to have thought out loud in this episode, only to learn that words do hurt and are easily misunderstood. I think the LO and TDF people should have counted to 10, took a few deep breaths, and then carefully considered what would be said in public and how it might be received before they ever posted anything.

Heck, it's not like this entire episode was-is attributed to a news leak by an insider.

[starshipeleven]

What about "LibreOffice" and "NotSoLibreOffice"?

Again, why would an enterprise release make it "NotSoLibre"?

[starshipeleven]

Time for another Fork?!

No it is not, go back to sleep

[starshipeleven]

Sounds like the LO folks are taking a page out of the Qt licensing playbook.

yeah, apart from the fact that the license isn't changing

[Veto]

Again, why would an enterprise release make it "NotSoLibre"?

Who knows? Why don't you describe what an enterprise release™ entails???

[starshipeleven]

Who knows?

What do you mean with "who knows"? Why the fuck would it need to add stuff to become non-libre?

Have you ever seen an opensource project that (ghasp) is actually monetizing itself with a businness offering? Opensource needs money to live and grow, where it makes sense many projects have made a businness offering.

Like say RHEL, SUSE Enterprise Linux, Syncthing/Kastelo, Wine/Crossover, Proxmox, and others?

The "Businness version" gives access to training and support teams to help set up or fix issues, and usually to a stable, polished release that receives support for a longer period of time.