
“LibreOffice is at serious risk” - rsecora
https://lwn.net/Articles/825602/
======
shp0ngle
This is hard to read without context.

From I can gather - there is a company, called “Collabora”, that sells
LibreOffice consultancy and LibreOffice “online” installations. This company
now contributes majority of development to LibreOffice. And lead the
development of “LibreOffice Online”, maybe?

And from what I can get, their business is not doing that well.

This e-mail is written by someone from that company.

~~~
corbet
The context is currently a few lines down on HN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23789659](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23789659)

~~~
ghaff
Fundamentally, OpenOffice and then LibreOffice never became a serious business
for any company with significant resources. It arguably circled nearby with
Novell and IBM at various times but nothing ever really clicked. Now there are
40 developers. Mostly from a company that apparently isn't doing that great.

LibreOffice has always been understaffed relative to the competition. But it
wouldn't shock me if there were more HR people associated with GSuite than
there are LibreOffice developers.

------
ptx
The post says that LibreOffice, the version you would download from
libreoffice.org, is "un-supported" and "not suitable for deployment in an
enterprise" and that some other commercial version is "more authentic and
genuine".

Why does the LibreOffice project then allegedly produce an unsupported, non-
genuine, unauthentic and unsuitable piece of software? They seem to be doing a
good job in most respects, so how and why are they supposedly failing to
produce usable releases? Debian's version seems fine, so perhaps Debian is
adding some of this mysterious authenticity?

~~~
zanny
Seriously if they want to sell LO just stop offering free downloads. Yes, its
free software, and alternative builds would percolate around for normal users
but you have the brand and I cannot imagine most companies would be keen on
either doing self managed builds or getting them from filehippo or something.

And yes, removing the free builds would severely stymie consumer adoption, but
I don't even think there is much of that left to begin with. Your average kid
uses Google Docs and has no reason to download anything.

~~~
ghaff
Some hobbyist--or some company offering optional support in some form--will
just do the builds. There are tons of Linux distros in this category. Builds
for open source software are a commodity. You can't stop them and still be
open source.

~~~
wmf
There's always trademarks, although I don't know if LibreOffice brand
recognition is strong enough to overcome not being free.

~~~
ghaff
True. On both counts. The potential users are probably not the casual ones who
are just using free online office suites by default anyway.

------
badsectoracula
IMO this is the most interesting part:

> Collabora - despite C'bra still putting a lot of work into LibreOffice
> Desktop, having an outstanding support capability, doing lots of marketing,
> being the largest code contributor to LibreOffice, and having lots of
> existing happy customers / references for desktop LibreOffice, ... etc. etc.

>

> We have not had -one- -single- -new- Collabora _Office_ customer since 2018
> - zero.

>

> => so it makes no economic sense at all to invest in -Desktop- Libreoffice
> you will never see a return.

>

> That is manageable - we are investing heavily in creating Online and that is
> going well, and it funds our work on LibreOffice.

------
danpalmer
As much as I’d love free software to be popular for being free, that’s never
been the case and is increasingly unlikely to ever become the case.

Free software needs to learn to compete on features if it’s going to have the
mainstream adoption necessary to survive.

This worked in engineering tools, Nginx and Apache are the most popular web
servers in their category, Postgres and MySQL have enormous support, and so
on.

I wonder why these are really so different? Most devs don’t care that much
about the freedom I don’t think. Maybe there’s something the free software
movement could learn from what engineering products are doing and apply it to
consumer products?

~~~
tharne
I think part of it at least is that the engineering tools have, on average, a
more technically sophisticated user base and those tools mostly involve
working at the command line or through an IDE like VS Code or the like. I
think a lot of where free software falls down is on the GUI, which is less of
an issue with engineering tools.

~~~
karlding
I agree. GUIs are hard!

On the other hand, it seems like Open Source has a lack of designers that are
willing to contribute. For example, in Tantacrul's critique of MuseScore [0],
there's issues highlighted that seem obvious in retrospect, but in Open Source
projects, unless there's someone who drives the user experience, it's easy to
miss all these small things that add up to signal (whether rightly or wrongly
is besides the point) a lack of polish.

[0]
[https://youtube.com/watch?v=4hZxo96x48A](https://youtube.com/watch?v=4hZxo96x48A)

~~~
throwbacktictac
That is squarely where the problem lies. There are good open source developers
out there as evidenced by the great Github projects. There are also good
designers out there such as those that maintain Dribbble.com profiles. What
keeps them from collaborating to produce top notch projects?

Thanks for sharing Tantacrul video. He's quite an entertaining bloke!

~~~
ghthor
Designers are hard to collaborate with, from my personal experiences.

------
MattGaiser
Does anyone here work an environment where LibreOffice is sufficient?

It replaces Word well, but for Excel, there is just too much of a shift for
me.

It is a great product, but given the market saturation of Office, I am not
sure there is really a place for it in the market spectrum.

~~~
hpen
I use LibreOffice calc daily as an excel replacement on Linux. I am a Software
Developer and prefer to use Linux for my development OS.

~~~
Havoc
>I use LibreOffice calc daily as an excel replacement on Linux. I am a
Software Developer

The issue is not whether software developers can replace their (barely
existent) Excel usage but whether accountants & office workers can.

I have yet to meet a SINGLE accountant aware of openoffice/libreoffice's
existence. OO/Libre is deader than dead in the one segment where it matters.

~~~
sushshshsh
How many people out there have workloads that can't be met by LibreOffice
Calc? I would like to meet those people because they must have very
interesting jobs and automating their work would have a high monetary impact.

~~~
bitwize
LibreOffice Calc absolutely chugs when it comes to recalculating. Entire
_sections of the economy_ run on large, complicated Excel sheets; porting them
over would not only be slow, cumbersome, and time-consuming, but would require
hardware that does not yet exist to run them on.

THERE IS NO REPLACEMENT FOR EXCEL in the financial sector. Part of the reason
why is because Excel has _customers_ \-- big, rich, important customers, and
lots of them -- and so it is supported and updated as if by an entity that
wants to please its customers.

~~~
anthony_barker
The same could have been said about lotus 123 in the early 90s. Companies got
rich getting himem.sys working

------
cxr
The LibreOffice project's imprimatur should be to stop existing. This isn't
facetious or snark. Make it a long-term goal—let's say 15 years.

The editing paradigm perpetuated by the legacy of MS Office is a dead end. The
web has its shortcomings, so it's easy to see why people opt for MS Office-
based workflows, but the end goal should be to wean businesses off
contemporary word processors and raise a generation of kids who aren't taught
to write essays in Microsoft Word or any other office suite that resembles the
ones we see today. A standardized "Markdown for the Web" (or AsciiDoc) with
native browser support would be a good 80/20 start and would move things out
of weird proprietary office formats and towards plain text. Users themselves
need not know the underlying file format is based on plain text, just like
most don't know that HTML is plain text—because they usually aren't even aware
of HTML in the first place. (Besides word processing, spreadsheets are a whole
other larger problem that can be handled once there's traction on this front.)

Right now LibreOffice is aligned against this goal as a result of perverse
incentives to continue perpetuating the MS Office model of document creation,
editing, and (let's face it: email-based) distribution.

The failure of standards bodies and browser developers to address the real
needs of MS Office customers should not be discounted. Heck, even EPUB which
is largely (X)HTML isn't even really Web-native, and that's a total failure on
the part of browser makers.

It might be prudent for the commercial companies associated with LibreOffice
to stop thinking of themselves as vendors of an MS Office alternative and
start thinking of themselves as a group who can see where the puck should be,
and then move both the Web and businesses+classrooms there, too—and capitalize
on being the first mover.

NB: Re-inventing the office suite as a web app (à la Google Docs) is _not_ the
kind of thing I'm talking about.

~~~
mattkrause
I'm not sure I understand _why_ you think this would be a good goal.

Plaintext formats are certainly nice. Markdown can certainly do formatting for
many simple documents (school reports, memos, etc). Sometimes, however, you
want more fine-grained, print-style control over layout, even for documents
that are often sent electronically (e.g., résumés). People still do print
things out too, like fliers and signup sheets.

A lot of Word's other features seem superfluous, but I'd bet that almost
everyone uses an idiosyncratic subset of them: I don't use mail merge, but
depend on "Compare Documents", for example.

~~~
cxr
> I'm not sure I understand why you think this would be a good goal.

You do already know. It's in your next sentence.

> Sometimes, however, you want more fine-grained, print-style control

That's fine. PDFs aren't going away, nor would aiming for the kind of thing I
mentioned preclude the plaintext formats from finally gaining the ability to
control print-level details with a set of formatting directives if you flip
the switch in the writing app to make it let you target a "print profile" for
that document. In fact TeX—being a plaintext format that also happens to lead
to many of the PDFs we see anyway—is already an example of how to get the
ultimate "fine-grained, print-style control" without being a clunky document
from an office suite, which aren't actually all that great at that level of
control, anyway (but TeX itself is not well-suited for this use case, for its
own reasons).

The point is that most people shuttling Office documents around are most of
the time not using it for those reasons, so their 80% use cases shouldn't
carry the baggage nor impose it on others. It would be one thing if it were
just a matter of people not knowing, but the reality is that neither the
tooling nor the cultural inertia for those non-existent tools are really where
they should be.

> People still do print things out too, like fliers and signup sheets.

nonsequitur

------
thrownaway954
i used to use LibreOffice back in the day when MSOffice was too expensive.
nowadays i just use google docs and google sheets. i'm sure 90% of people out
there use a browser/cloud based office product. if LibreOffice wants to remain
relevant, they should make some sort of cloud based product (if they already
have, i'm not aware of it).

~~~
toppy
They addressed this partly by LibreOffice Online:
[https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-
online/](https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/)

~~~
thrownaway954
it says its unsupported. this leads me to believe this isn't anything official
from them, just something of any experiment. i'm not going to "test" not trust
an unsupported office suite that i need for everyday use.

------
philistine
I think a big issue with Libre Office is that it’s simply an open source
version of Microsoft Office. They have no identity in my mind. This lack of
identity invites unfair comparisons to Microsoft Office whenever you’re using
it.

The other office suite in my life is Apple’s iWork. And let me tell you, it
has a ton of issues, but it is not a copy of Office at all. It has its own
goals and identity. I self-published a book using Pages, it’s not completely
lacking in features. But it does things in its own way. So I don’t compare it
to Office. I evaluate it against the job that needs to be done.

------
slipheen
It seems to me like they're saying "Commercial development for LibreOffice is
at serious risk".

It may be that all commercially supported development on LibreOffice stops-
I'm not sure this would be a terrible thing at this point.

Abiword (is a MUCH smaller editor) and gets a release every few years or so -
There's not much it needs anymore.

Evolution is no longer commercially supported, nor is Thunderbird - Developent
may have slowed down after they lost their patrons, but they already did most
things that they set out to anyway.

Many OSS software doesn't have or need commercial benefactors.

My personal use-cases are certainly relatively restricted, but maybe it's OK
to just let it go into maintenance mode? LibreOffice already does pretty much
everything I'd want it to.

I (again, personally) don't see a whole lot of demand for new features.

------
LockAndLol
This is a pretty serious accusation or message to spread around. I for one
wouldn't like to see Libreoffice die. We can't let the only serious, open-
source alternative to the titan of M$ simply disappear.

But this was too much of a long, badly structured rant. Without prior
knowledge of the inner working, it looks like rambling. It would be a much
better post if it were written like an article or wiki page with headers and
subsections:

\- top 3 reasons there is serious risk in bullet points

\- each bullet point with a single paragraph or sentence summarizing what
could be done to mitigate that point; maybe even a personal appeal to the
reader

\- a header per reason going into depth of the why and a more in depth
mitigation strategy than what was in the first bullet points

\- one header with subreasons that are important

The whole thing should maybe even be prefaced with a sentence mentioning the
target audience. I donate yearly projects like this and have no idea what else
can be done.

------
sys_64738
What support do you need for a word processor? LibreOffice is just a fork of
OpenOffice.org so perhaps they should look to merging their code back into
OO.org?

------
rjohnk
In regards to naming, why not call it "LibreOffice Community Edition" instead
of "Personal"?

------
29athrowaway
In Linux, I use Softmaker FreeOffice. A free (but not open source) office
suite of excellent quality.

Looks as polished as MS Office, works perfectly with HiDPI, and is much faster
than both MS Office and LibreOffice.

~~~
setzer22
I used FreeOffice for a while, but strangely enough, I saw it struggle with
medium-size documents. At some point, there were several seconds of input lag.

Apart from that issue, their goal is MS Office compatibility, and they deliver
quite well. Even more obscure features like review mode and highlighting of
changes worked without issues, and I was able to exchange documents with MS
Office users.

------
jimbob45
In all honesty, I think that most of the LibreOffice audience would be happier
with WordPad if they knew it existed (middle school students, one-off work
projects, personal story-writing).

~~~
rwmj
Isn't that a proprietary Windows-only product? How is it anything to do with
LibreOffice?

------
agustif
How feasible would it be to build a community open source modern stack
cloud/multi-platform alternative?

Someone is up for the challenge? I might give it a try, who knows.

------
speedgoose
I feel like Libre Office was a great alternative to Microsoft Office up to
about 10 years ago.

Since and from my obviously biased point of view, the only users left are the
Linux users who do not want proprietary software, and the people who want a
powerful office software but can't afford or don't want to pay for Microsoft
office.

The user interface is a relic of the past in my opinion. I heard that they
were working on improving the user experience, but I don't know what's the
state of these projects.

I used to recommend OpenOffice and LibreOffice. Today I recommend Microsoft
Office.

------
askafriend
Just an anecdote: LibreOffice has had 0 impact on my life in the past decade.

In that decade, my expectations for text editing software has changed
dramatically. I expect online, cloud-based, collaborative, document editing.
Anything less is a no go, and I expect modern interfaces for software I use
often.

Unfortunately the LibreOffice pitch is just un-compelling to me. I won't
really be losing any sleep over this.

~~~
oh-4-fucks-sake
To that point, I know Office 365 has really caught on, but Google
Drive/Docs/Sheets really beat them to market and it's become my go-to for
collab.

