Right. I think that whole premise is wrong.

Why would enterprises buy a support plan? That they don't is the issue of companies building Libre Office that do a lot of the development, according to the email.

There are two options: 1. Libre Office works for the job it is supposed to do. Then no one needs a support plan. It's an office product, not enterprise software where you need technical support to design your next hardware thingie. It just has to work. 2. Libre Office does not work well as an office product. Then the organization using it will search a different solution, get a web service, stay with Windows.

There is maybe a miniscule market where there is a well funded push to develop a government IT system complete with Office interop and everything, and then maybe that project will pay for development, and maybe that can be treated as a support contract. But that market is seemingly not big enough for the people behind this push.

I see a second dimension to this: Libre Office is just not good. Every time I tried to use it it let me down. Last time - last year, and that was indeed on the job - it crashed and ate the document I was working on. Add to that the Java issues and that it feels clunkly. It's sadly just a stopgap solution, not something reliable or fun to use.

Maybe this is not a free software crisis, but just the reality of the market not being there? And maybe it does not have to be?

I've been using uniquely LibreOffice on mac + linux for the past (as far back as I remember) and have only had the opposite experiences: it works every time, is capable of opening all document formats, and has never crashed.

I encourage you to try again to see if maybe LibreOffice has improved since you last tried it, and you won't be disappointed.

I heard that between each of the many tries over the last ten years ;) But I will surely try it again when I find myself in the unfortunate position to have to produce or open an office document.

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.

The person who wrote the linked email is not part of the same organization (TDF) who controls the LibreOffice brand and is offering a free download. He's part of a company (Collabora) which provides commercial support for LibreOffice and contributes significantly to the codebase.

I'm sure your suggestion would help solve his problems. However, it's considerably more drastic than some of the things he's proposing, which mostly amount to marketing changes. Taking away a free download for casual users would likely be opposed by TDF.

The author says that some firms indeed sell LibreOffice with support but then file the bugs upstream and expect them to be solved at zero cost.

>> Another pathology is that there are companies who ship LibreOffice, often claiming support, but then file all their tickets up-stream and hope they are fixed for free.

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.

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

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