Hi This is my feedback from a community member point of view.
* LibreOffice is at serious risk If I need help as a community contributor I get a lot of feedback from Heiko which is fine and very welcome. If I need coding support it's not that easy cause there is no person from TDF who will support contributors with coding work. So I can do whatever I want - which is fine - however I can do it myself - which will blog for example design group ideas from < 2015. So we need more developers. Sometimes people from the ecosystem do help (me) for good will. * How to pay for LibreOffice development? On the libreoffice.org download page users can pay for LibreOffice or get it for free. TDF gets the money from the donations (1.5 million), but how do they donate? Enterprises or private/home users? I got the feedback that private users donate to TDF enterprises using LibreOffice for free without donation. Would you donate for LibreOffice if you work for the Cabinet Office in the UK? I would say, the employer thinks that the Cabinet pays for LibreOffice. No employer would donate to the software the enterprise offers. So TDF didn't get money for the future of LibreOffice from enterprises. But the ecosystem partners have developers who add new features to LibreOffice and these features get paid from enterprises. Yes the features get paid otherwise they won't get implemented. Since 2018 Colabora didn't sold the Colabora Office suite on the desktop. How will pay for features when there are no employers? The French government uses LibreOffice and has a support company. That's perfect, but the support company is no ecosystem partner so there is no upstream work. Even worse they write bug reports to BZ and hope that volunteers (or an ecosystem partner) fix them. So for me it looks like private/home users donate to LibreOffice and support the work but enterprises forget to give some revenue back. Is this ok? * Can there be a solution? Sure there is one big solution: LibreOffice the brand name. 10 years after OpenOffice there is the LibreOffice brand and as written it stands for good quality. So let's use it. + Download page Compare the following download pages: LibreOffice: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download/ NextCloud: https://nextcloud.com/install/ In LibreOffice you have the download link and when the download starts you go to the donaten page. In NextCloud you have the different platforms AND Providers, Enterprise Solutions and many more. There is a direct link between free download link and company support. Nobody will say NextCloud is open core, but NextCloud promotes the complete ecosystem on the download page. It would be a simple change to have the TDF download AND ecosystem downloads on the LibreOffice.org webpage all together. + LibreOffice Brand LibreOffice brand is very good. But if you look at the windows store for example there are LibreOffice apps you can pay for but they don't give any revenue back to LibreOffice. French government support companies give and revenue back, ... it's hard for ecosystem partners to win government tenders cause they have to fight against companies that use LibreOffice for free and don't support future development. Here my idea is to use the LibreOffice Brand. If you see LibreOffice at enterprises there should be an enterprise edition installed which can have the same features as the TDF LibreOffice edition, but the enterprise means that it will come from an TDF ecosystem partner. Maybe the enterprise edition has LTS or an easier update feature or better integration with the enterprise software landscape, ... whatever the ecosystem partners plan to offer on the libreoffice.org download page. Working together is the way FOSS works best. LibreOffice is a success story but the target is the flagship project from Microsoft, so we need all resources to be competitive. cheers Andreas_K
