Is it though? What support do you imagine people requiring for an office suite? I pay for MS Office. I can’t really imagine what kind of individual support issues I could raise? If a document I need doesn’t open then it doesn’t open - having the bug fixed a week later is absolutely no help to me, and I’d just ask the sender to send in a different format in the mean time so really what’s the point?
I’m not sure why you’re getting downvoted but somebody else has posted an excellent LWN article about the Libreoffice enterprise licensing issue and one of the biggest problems faced by LibreOffice commercial proponents is that MS has historically provided such lousy (non existent) support that people have started believing that it’s absolutely all right for your office suite to have little to no support. Even in enterprise environments. But you would not expect such poor support from any other software, especially if you were paying $100/yr for it, or a few hundreds for a perpetual license.
Yes I think people are commenting and downvoting without any context on what has led to this - people are not in fact happy to pay for support and think they’re fine without it.
Maybe it's different with less sophisticated users, but I can't tell you the last time I went to a company for support on a commercial desktop product. I've either found the answer to a problem by searching or I figure the problem will be fixed (or not) at some point. In general dealing with support is going to take me a bunch of time without a useful result.
Last year I bought an office licence through work and bought a laptop which came with a trial of office preinstalled. I tried activating the trial with my bought license but no dice. I tried uninstalling the trial, didn’t work. I ended up calling MS support and they remotes into the laptop, with my authorisation, cleaned up the trial with a special removal tool and got me up and running.
Now ok the problem was caused by them in the first place, but support was easy up contact, I didn’t wait long and they fixed the problem.
Corporations use a lot of fancy tech like Citrix, VDIs, remote application management software, securuty software, etc. They can often end up with weird problems with software compatibility and need vendor support.
Yes but especially in a corporate setting you may be receiving those documents regularly. Maybe it’s a supplier who has a particular format, or a customer who sends their designs in a certain document.
Or maybe HR receives resumes and a certain percentage don’t open because of a bug.
Then there’s stuff beyond bugs. There’s training and migration for people who’ve been using MS Office all their lives. There’s early access to RCs. There’s support if you want to learn how to deploy within your enterprise rules. Maybe your enterprise gives employees locked down laptops and the way their laptops are locked down prevents a new update from working.
Finally, you may have migrated and would like to use a portion of the money you’re saving by switching away from the Microsoft solution (which is significantly more expensive for enterprises) to keep the solution that allows you to save that money supported.
Put it turns out people actually don’t do this for office suites... that’s the context of this story. Collabra haven’t had a new LibreOffice support client since 2018. Enterprises they try and sell to say they don’t use or want support and don’t understand the proposition.
As is pointed out, Collabra hasn’t had a new support client since 2018, but other companies have had support clients. These companies sell libreoffice clients under the name libreoffice, unlike Collabra, and don’t actually contribute back to the project, but basically just open support tickets relying on upstream devs to provide support for free, while they undercut the companies providing support for the project.
While morally questionable. Philosophically; Why is this a problem? I suppose I could provide enterprise support for Bash or Midnight Commander without contributing back to these software projects.
What if I don't know how to install the software to begin with?
Or maybe there was a power outage and I "lost" the latest version of that important presentation I was working on, then closed out of the recovery window—how can I get back to where I was?
What if I forget my online credentials?
What if a document isn't formatted like I expect it to be, because I'm using the application wrong?
How do people use MS Office and Google Docs without encountering these kind of problems? Maybe they aren't problems in practice, or people just work around in practice. As I said, if a document doesn't look right then what am I going to do? Open a support ticket and wait for a new version of the software? Does anyone really do that?
Note that the question I'm asking is the same question that the LibreOffice themselves are panicking about!
Microsoft sells an entire software system (actually multiple such software systems) that are expensive, and require CALs (per user licensing) and server licensing simply to deploy software.
Microsoft also provides many different ways to install/deploy Office products for enterprises. In fact, one of the biggest selling point of the O365 enterprise tier is flexibility in deployment/installation options.
Well, from my experience at Fortune 500s, they do encounter these problems, but they're supported by internal IT departments. As developers (I just assume everyone on HN is one by default), we aren't really the intended audience. If office products are essential to your job, having someone to support you when your presentation is messed up (or even blame) is really important.
Collabora's support model allows companies to outsource that support responsibility, similar to http://electric.ai/
Does it make financial sense for their users? I don't know. But I can see the value proposition for someone making office software purchasing decisions, especially if they're concerned about a lesser-known brand like LibreOffice, or think open source software is inherently less reliable.
Enterprise is a different beast. They require someone to call when something goes wrong. It might not ever go wrong, but having the contract is still important.
Most individuals don’t need anything like this type of support. But if you’re a large company or government, it’s required.
> But if you’re a large company or government, it’s required.
Even the LibreOffice people agree it doesn't really seem to be required. Hence their panic.
> It is routinely the case that I meet organizations that have
deployed free LibreOffice without long term support, with no security
updates etc. Try the Cabinet Office in the UK (at the center of UK
Government), or a large European Gov't Department I recently visited -
15,000 seats - with some great FLOSS enthusiasm, but simply no
conceptual frame that deploying un-supported FLOSS in the enterprise
hurts the software that they then rely on. Or a giant Pharma company
in the news right now; companies do it left & right.
Spreadsheet processing and coding up customized formula could cost a lot of time I imagine, it could require a technical programmer with experience using the software.
can this 20 user limit be bypassed somehow? if the software is under MPL, does that allow restricting functionality in the software like the user limit imposed here?
How has your experience been than an installed libreoffice? I have this thing where like 5-7 users have to work on a network share drive on "xls" files. For over 15 years now we have worked on this setup whereby everyone knows the folder structure, the naming scheme among other things.
I want to try this browser thing for "collaborative editing" which isnt present in excel or libreoffice desktop but i fail to understand how i can manage this.
do i have to map the network drive over to the browser engine? do i open the network drive as always and double click the file to run in browser?
I think you misunderstood what they're saying - you can get it for free no matter the user count, as it's open source software. They only do support contracts with organisations greater than 20 people.
I have to admit I am super sketched out about anything that is derived from a fully open source project, and has a 'try the demo' button on it that pops up a form to fill out your personal details on, which is obviously a pipeline into somebody's CRM system.
This was one of the first things I saw after clicking this "enterprise-ready" title and that's when I closed the tab.
I'm happy to see someone polish up LibreOffice and ask money for it, I'd gladly market that to my family who complains about this ugly shit I install for them and my continuing refusal to help them maintain their accustomization with Microsoft products if they're not willing to paying for it, but if I have to even ask for a trial, it's not going to be worth it.
Fair enough. Yet, is it unreasonable that a company investing in open source - in open source only - and doing all kind of work in the community, actively tries to engage with people that show interest? :) Unless of course they go after you with a gun to force you to buy something, but I think that's not the spirit of open source and freedom of choice, and making happy customers, in which the company operates ;)
Seems like[1] Collabora might use profits to support the LibreOffice development, in which case that's a great way to support an important open source platform and also build a company with a FOSS-friendly/supporting business model.
As much as I love LibreOffice, this does not work really well.
From what I understand, a LibreOffice instance is created on a server for every user and the rendered interface is transferred to users via some remote-desktop-like way. This leads to lags and generally very poor performance compared to GoogleDocs.
I think the world badly needs a GoogleDocs-like office suite that would be a libre software, would support concurrent editing and would ODT as its default file format. But so far, such product does not exist, unfortunately.
"Office suite" implies that it includes a text processor, electronic spreadsheet and a presentation editor. Both these projects are not even close to being office suites.
My org uses Google Docs as office suite and I find it quite good and prefer it over any flavour of Microsoft Office. Nevertheless, there's a _huge_ and vocal push against Google Docs suite in favour of Microsoft Office from some internal stakeholders. None of the complaints from this group go beyond something to the tune of "I know Excel better".
As good as LibreOffice may be (I personally think it is _not_ better than Google docs) and as much as I like the romantic idea of open source office suite, I don't believe this will be successful/sustainable in the long run. The bulk of office suite users are not interested on using alternatives. These users want office running on their machine, period. I'd even venture to say that most users would rather have apps installed instead of Microsoft Office Online.
If someone's a power user of Excel, I can understand them wanting to stay on Excel even if personally I pretty much just use Google Sheets as an easy to use and format table.
>I'd even venture to say that most users would rather have apps installed instead of Microsoft Office Online.
I dunno. Maybe if they rarely share documents? But, for me, online sharing and collaborative editing of documents has been a game changer.
I'm an engineer (not software, not a developer, not in "tech") and we have been switching a lot of our workflows to open source software and the like. This isn't because we have a "free" or "libre" fetish, it's more that the open source technologies tend to plug and play better with others, have open standards for file formats etc., and we can have clients and collaborators work on any OS they want. I don't think Collabora is going to be alone in their struggles with this type of business model.
From what I can see / understand is that there a few large corporations / govts whatever you like that provide financial support in the form of the Pareto distribution. One or two organizations provide the majority of support (85%+). What this usually means is that the organization(s) pays for support, has the company like Collabora write all the code, and in the end they just take what they want and either re-implement it in a different way or actually have a whole different product than the "public" one. This has a double-edge effect; the few organization who pay for all the time for programmers implement the features they want (why not? they foot the bill) and the developers end up building a product that may or may not be good for the rest of the users. Case in point with LibreOffice and Collabora. Collabora pushes most all the commits, yet they are an online version of an office suite to plugin to Nextcloud, etc.
To be honest, LibreOffice should be charging for their product. I'm not sure how they would or what the mechanism would be, but it's great software and has $ value.
You can find a customized version of it on web.de / gmx.net / mail.com under the product name of "Online Office", once you login with a registered user.
I want to see Collabora Office integrated as a Google Workspace app. I understand that others want to host their own servers, but I want the longevity of ODF combined with the convenience of a hosted environment like Workspace. I would think that governments that mandate ODF (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument_adoption) would want the convenience of an online version of LibreOffice combined with a native desktop application suite.
If you are using either one of the following portal it's basically under the name of "Online Office" (there's also mail, cloud and other services similar to what Google has): https://web.de/https://gmx.net/https://mail.com
The first two is mainly for German users, the last one is for international ones.
I doubt they want to tie their fortunes to Google, especially given that Google is one of their competitors. Furthermore, Collabora produces mostly (maybe all?) libre software, so integrating with Google doesn't mesh with that.
Collabora Office is integrated with NextCloud though.
Thanks, that's what I think their position is. But there are plenty of apps in the Google Workspace Marketplace that are competitive with Google's: LucidChart, draw.io, Zoho, etc. I'm sure these apps more than pay for their integration development costs with new subscription revenue.
Something in Libreoffice makes me avoid it. No matter what, right now the best office solution is from Microsoft. OnlyOffice identified this and worked to clone the thing, because why not clone the best instead of new designs and changes. This makes it quite good actually. Sure, there are a few bugs here and there but the whole thing works quite good.
Because after you clone, you can never diverge. Unless you can match the development resources of the megacorp, you will fall behind.
It's a catch 22 to focus software development on duplicating a UI that will comfort people who will never use your software over the software you're duplicating - or if they do, they do it because you're the one they don't have to pay for.
Apropos to nothing, Firefox is an interesting project.
Something many open-source projects could learn from. Corporations spend millions on usability R&D and the de-facto open source project equivalent is usually just programmers winging the UI based on nothing.
Wondering if there are any public NextCloud options that have support for Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE). Would be nice if there was a list of public instances on https://forum.collaboraonline.com/
They won't do under-20 count licensing. If your org/corp is under 20-count, just use it.
So far, it has been 98% perfect. One or two hiccups, yet: we own our data, in our Debian servers. Android app works awesome. Browser works awesome.
Give it a go if you want.