LibreOffice 2020/2025 Marketing Plan [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

LibreOffice 2020/2025 Marketing Plan [pdf]

nextcloud.documentfoundation.org

38 pointsrsecora18 comments

Executive summary - the LibreOffice ecosystem is trying to find a path that ensures and improves the commercial viability of the various commercial players (who account for >90% of the actual programming work that goes into LO), whilst remaining vendor neutral and open-source.

Not an easy needle to thread.

I feel like this will create another OpenOffice forking into LibreOffice kind of situation.

I can see myself not being able to pay for the Enterprise product, but wanting it, and having the core part available to fork and extend.

It's a noble way to guarantee a good management and funding, but it's still rings different to how Open source feels. I don't know how to explain it, really. I'd say the one project that rings somewhat true to that spirit in my mind would be PostgreSQL.

That being said, I will always use and support LibreOffice and their descendants, should they exist in the future.

Did I miss the presentation saying there will be feature differentiation? As far as I have seen it's all branding and support, so there isn't really a reason to fork for individuals.

There is for enterprise, but at that point why not either purchase support from the authorized companies or join them

The whole ordeal with the Online part led me to believe there will be feature differentiation. I might be wrong.

It is indeed blurry on this particular matter.

I thought that their own research had showed that people weren't buying support that was already available

> It is routinely the case that I meet organizations that have deployed free LibreOffice without long term support

and that people didn't even buy support from Microsoft

> Microsoft gives poor to non-existent support to the majority of users so ~no-one expects to buy it

So why would they now suddenly pay for a product where (I think, not an expert) the only proposed differentiation is support and calling it 'Enterprise'?

I'm sure this already exists but IMO they should switch to working on an online version, by which I mean software you can install on a server that gives you an online document editor like Google Drive, Office 365 etc...

I'm probably just not the target market. One way or another I bought and owned MS Office from about 1993 through 2008-9 but I haven't touched it since really have no need. Nearly everything I write is for online consumption. LibreOffice nor MS Office do this well. Using either to generate PDFs is also horrible. Unlike HTML, PDFs don't reflow for my phone, tablet, etc..

I'm sure others will disagree but it just feels like it's about time for these products to die. Maybe the spreadsheet can say around for but me, if I can't let other people edit together live what's the point? In fact I'd think all the work from home from Covid should make this abundantly clear that both MS Office and LibreOffice are like BBS software from the early 90s

It does already exist[1]. Although I'm not particularly familiar with the "core" LibreOffice Online, the Collabora Online[2] branded version is super easy to get running on Nextcloud[3] (via Docker).

[1] https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/

[2] https://www.collaboraoffice.com/libreoffice-from-collabora/

[3] https://nextcloud.com/collaboraonline/

Read the post from a few days ago and some of the comments...open source purists (looking at you, Stallman) might be freaking out but this might give LO the much-needed boost in performance and formatting.

I'm sure it's not easy coming up with something like this with few devs, but I hate to see it flounder when so many office tools are subscription-based now without much of a choice (maybe you could pick up a coveted CD-ROM with a license intact)

I worked well for Qt \s

Now even less people will use it due to fear of being extorted by some lawyers.

> open source purists (looking at you, Stallman)

Lol I don't think Stallman would describe himself that way!

The final slide identifies this as a proposal, and and anticipates that there will be changes before the plan is finalised. Does anyone know if there's been movement since? It proposes that the strategy should be announced on July 15th, so I'd expect there to be a newer version by now.

(It also suggests that the proposal has a single author, but doesn't say who it is. Is it Michael Meeks?)

Some context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23789659

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23793942

> Create a LibreOffice Enterprise Ecosystem LinkedIn page where to push same stories, to connect LinkedIn profiles of all contacts

> Encourage project members to be on LinkedIn

Yes, this is how I imagine any enterprise would act. Also, they need an ukulele music.

Just make it so word documents don't look like garbage.

Although it is a valid point, you are missing that it's Microsoft who prevents everyone from doing it [0].

[0] https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/community/osor/case/complex-sing...

Unfortunately that very presentation in the OP looks very much like it was done in LibreOffice :( Something about the formatting is just off.

(LO-Dev here) It is one of those "death by a thousand cuts" situations. We have fixed a ton of issues, but there are still a ton more. Sometimes the formatting changes between versions of Word. Sometimes the formatting is off because we have bugs. Sometimes Word has a bug, and then we have to figure out what that bug is and try and have the "same" bug.

How long until the libreoffice.biz domain from their presentation is taken?

Edit: it already is. Not sure it is by them, whois doesn't give any information.

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