Hacker News Reader

Comment by shp0ngle | Hacker News Reader

The Community/Enterprise language is confusing, if you don't know the backstory.

A big chunk of actual development of LibreOffice is done by a company called Collabora, that is also selling LibreOffice-based products for mobile and for cloud.

https://www.collaboraoffice.com

They seem to be the major contributor to LibreOffice Online (even still have their logo there?). Which is actually including the iOS and Android apps.

https://github.com/LibreOffice/online

On actual LibreOffice proper, which they call "LibreOffice Core", they seem to have 30% of commits, with RedHat also 30%.

View on HN

Collabora no longer uses TDF infra to develop Online, the new repo is https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online

Ah, I missed that. Again it is a bit confusing. LibreOffice Online is actually the same as Collabora, and it includes the mobile releases.

Explanation from Mike (The Document Foundation) [0]

>Why are we doing this? Well, please read the blog announcement to find out. But TL;DR: The majority of code commits in LibreOffice come from companies in the ecosystem around it. Many of them are finding it difficult to justify investments into LibreOffice, paying developers etc., while other companies/organisations/governments that use LibreOffice simply download it from the TDF website, install it and never contribute anything back.

>That's their right, of course, but it's not great for long-term development of LibreOffice. So by calling the version from TDF "Community", we're stressing that it only has community support, and businesses/large organisations should get LO-based products from the ecosystem.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/lblnfn/libreoffice_7...

yeah, my reaction is, wait, there's a product with "Libre" in the very name that is not actually open source, only the "Community" version is, is that what's going on? I thought the whole point of LibreOffice was to be open source, it's in the name! Is it actually "open core" or something?

Sort of?

It seems the naming is just for branding. Collabora seems to be putting all their code for online and mobile back upstream.

https://github.com/LibreOffice/online/tree/master/ios

it is updated often.

edit

also see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26013601

It's confusing, but no, it's not open core. That thing is a genuine full LO.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com