Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

LibreOffice: the next five years

Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Thursday 23rd of July 2020 07:20:38 AM Filed under
LibO

In response to these problems, members of the LibreOffice community have been working on a five-year marketing plan, the core of which can be seen in the slides linked above. The intent is to create differentiated versions of LibreOffice while avoiding open-core or proprietary business models. Part of that involves getting a better handle on the LibreOffice brand.

The plan starts by creating the concept of the "LibreOffice Engine", which is a term to describe the core LibreOffice code. It is meant to be a way to enable products selling under their own brand to associate themselves with LibreOffice while maintaining their own identity. "LibreOffice Engine" is described in the plan as a sort of equivalent to the highly successful "Intel Inside" branding effort. Presumably this term would be trademarked by the Document Foundation; the plan does not get into what constraints would be put on who could use the trademark (and how).

Then, there is the Personal Edition, which would be "forever free" and only available from the Document Foundation. This release would be tagged, according to the plan, "volunteer supported, not suggested for production environments or strategic documents". The alternative would be "LibreOffice Enterprise", which would only be available from "ecosystem members". This version would come with commercial support and a corresponding price tag.

LibreOffice Online seems to be a place where a lot of tension resides, perhaps unsurprisingly, since that is where the bulk of the money is being made with LibreOffice now. Companies would like to keep parts of LibreOffice Online to themselves, but that threatens to disrupt the volunteer part of the development community. The plan involves the same split between "personal" and "enterprise" offerings, but adds a little note: "There will be an X month gap between the release of the two versions: LibreOffice Online Enterprise and LibreOffice Online Personal".

The hope is that this plan will give the true "ecosystem members" something attractive to sell and, to an extent, free them from the difficult challenge of competing with the free LibreOffice offering. It is, in many ways, reminiscent of the path Red Hat took years ago to differentiate its Enterprise Linux offering, complete with insinuations that the free version might not be fully trustworthy. That approach has clearly worked well for Red Hat; it would be hard to argue that it has not worked well for the wider Linux community too.

Free software is an inherently challenging base upon which to try to build a company. Many in the free-software community are happily indifferent to the fate of companies working with the code, but without successful companies we would not have much of the code that we depend on every day. As Meeks pointed out, LibreOffice without companies would look a lot like the cobweb-strewn OpenOffice project; it is hard to see that as a win for anybody. So one can only wish LibreOffice and the Document Foundation luck as they seek a way to solve this problem while remaining true to the free-software principles that sparked the project's launch in the first place. Ten years of LibreOffice is nowhere near enough.

Read more

»

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.

More on Tux Machines: About ● Gallery ● Forum ● Blogs ● Search ● News ● RSS Feed

Part of Bytes Media ● Sister sites below.

TechBytes Techrights button

Powered by Drupal, an open source content management system

Content available under CC-BY-SA CC

© by original authors

Powered by CentOS 6.5 (GNU/Linux), Varnish, and Drupal 6