LibreOffice / The Document Foundation Generated Around One Million Dollars For 2019

[phoronix]

Phoronix: LibreOffice / The Document Foundation Generated Around One Million Dollars For 2019

The Document Foundation that is behind the cross-platform LibreOffice open-source office suite has published their 2019 annual report...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=TDF-2019-Annual-Report

[tildearrow]

Typo:

or 2017's income at at 743,111 EUR.

[NotMine999]

For someone that is used to reading the financial reports of publicly traded corporations, this "annual report" from TDF is truly lacking in any details.

Any finance-minded person trying to make an honest evaluation of the finances of TDF cannot do that based on this "report".

I guess whatever legal framework under which this foundation operate must not be very strict on financial reporting.

There is no way to make an informed opinion regarding the accounting system(s) used by TDF.

There is no testament by a certified public accountant (expected in the USA) regarding the accuracy of the reported numbers.

For all we know the numbers in this "annual report" are floobydust.

I always knew from personal experience that LibreOffice software was good for writing fiction

[uid313]

Great, I hope they can get more money so they can further improve LibreOffice.

You can donate to LibreOffice. 💰️💸️🤑️

[mifritscher]

@NotMine999: Then please describe exactly what are you missing. And no, you don't need a testament of these numbers in many countries.
"
For all we know the numbers in this "annual report" are floobydust.
"
These can be written by everyone without any incidence. Especially in italic, bold, red letters.

[brent]

That's actually very little if you consider the size of the project and how hard it is to maintain such a big codebase. If LibreOffice wants to seriously compete with Microsoft in the future, they probably need 10x the money at the very least.

[timrichardson]

So now I feel my regular but small donation is making a difference, because it sounds like the revenue is mostly from users making small donations.

[timrichardson]

That's actually very little if you consider the size of the project and how hard it is to maintain such a big codebase. If LibreOffice wants to seriously compete with Microsoft in the future, they probably need 10x the money at the very least.

This revenue does not represent the effort that goes into the project. Companies like Collabra contribute developers, but are not funded from this €1m.
The other thing to note in my opinion is that Microsoft doesn't develop the core product much. The file formats hardly change and VBA must be 20 year old. And the new products which do get development, like mobile and web, only support a small subset of features, so there's not much point for microsoft in making the product more functional. Office is more of a cash cow than Windows, I think.

[starshipeleven]

For all we know the numbers in this "annual report" are floobydust.

Yeah, because publicly traded company are never caught fudging the numbers as well

[Slartifartblast]

That's actually very little if you consider the size of the project and how hard it is to maintain such a big codebase. If LibreOffice wants to seriously compete with Microsoft in the future, they probably need 10x the money at the very least.

Money doesn't necessarily = solid software, O365 being a good example.