LibreOffice: The Next Five Years

By Jonathan Corbet

July 9, 2020

The LibreOffice project would seem to be on a roll. It produces what is widely seen as the leading free office-productivity suite, and has managed to move out of the shadow of the moribund (but brand-recognized)Apache OpenOffice project. The LibreOffice 7 release is coming within a month, and the tenth anniversary of thefounding of the Document Foundation arrives in September. Meanwhile, LibreOffice Online

is taking off and, seemingly, seeing some market success. So it is a bit surprising to see the project's core developers in a sort of crisis mode while users worry about a tag that showed up in the project's repository.

LibreOffice was based on firm free-software principles, and is an egalitarian organization overall, so it is not surprising that the appearance of a "Personal Edition" tag in a recent 7.0 release candidate raised some eyebrows. Company-dominated projects will often withhold features for "enterprise" customers, delaying their arrival into the second-class "community edition" or keeping them entirely proprietary. But LibreOffice is not supposed to be such a project; it is owned by an independent foundation and its development is driven by a few companies. LibreOffice is freely shared by everybody, or at least it has been so far.

The fuss quickly reached a level that required the Document Foundation's board to issue a statement about what was going on. The board emphasized that there will be no license change for LibreOffice, and no changes to " the license, the availability, the permitted uses and/or the functionalities ". But there is still something going on:

This "Personal Edition" tag line is part of a wider 5 years marketing plan we are preparing and it has the purpose of differentiating the current, free and community supported LibreOffice from a LibreOffice Enterprise set of products and services provided by the members of our ecosystem.

So, while nothing is going to change, there is still a plan to create different versions of LibreOffice, some of which will need to be paid for.

Some problems

The driving force behind the changes is easy enough to understand; it is one that many successful free-software projects face. LibreOffice is a huge program, and developing it takes a lot of work. According to this marketing plan [PDF] put together by the project, nearly 70% of the changes to LibreOffice come from developers paid by "ecosystem companies"; those companies pay about 40 people to work on LibreOffice. That is not a small expense; the companies involved will only be able to sustain that level of development if LibreOffice is bringing in a corresponding amount of revenue.

In a lengthy post titled "Some problems", project co-founder Michael Meeks explained that this revenue is not coming in. Part of the problem is that Microsoft provides " poor to non-existent support to the majority of users " of Office, he said, so nobody thinks in terms of buying support for any office suite:

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.

Companies think of LibreOffice, he said, in the same way that they think about web browsers, which are available for free and are well supported. But work on web browsers is paid for by advertising, which is not a model that works for an office suite.

The problem is compounded by companies that sell inexpensive "support" for LibreOffice, but which are not involved in its development and are not really able to provide that support. Those companies " file all their tickets up-stream and hope they are fixed for free ". Companies working in that mode have no problem pricing their offerings below those of the companies doing the actual work (and thus winning much of the business that does exist). In addition, they simply call their offerings "LibreOffice", which actually looks more authentic than services from other companies, which are trying to build their own brands around LibreOffice support.

LibreOffice, he concluded, has tried to do something unique and is finding its path to be difficult:

As we look around the industry we see tons of organizations exploring ways to solve similar problems. LibreOffice's is ‑particularly‑ challenging, because we aspire to being a vendor neutral project. There are reasonably well-known ways to build a company controlled, branded, FLOSS project - we know and love lots of them: openSUSE, Fedora, Nextcloud, ownCloud etc. this is the norm. With TDF we tried to do something far harder - to create an vendor neutral ecosystem that can help retain the community spirit while delivering on our mission. That has proved extraordinarily harder.

The result of all this is that the LibreOffice ecosystem " is under long term stress ".

The plan

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.

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