For that to be viable it would have to add a real benefit that people would be willing to pay for. Given that LibreOffice is the child of commercial software (StarOffice) that tried exactly this - at a time when the market for office software was much better - I have little hope for a commercial desktop office that is not Microsoft. Even for Microsoft the market for the desktop version seems to be dying.
That doesn't mean that apparently some have made a profit from OpenOffice and LibreOffice. I haven't seen one in a while but for some time scams that tried to sell you an unmodified OpenOffice or LibreOffice on a subscription basis were quite common.
does not necessarily mean:
>> [I have little hope for a] commercial desktop office that is not Microsoft.
Companies (and consumers) might have no reason to pay for the actual software itself, but they will pay for:
- Support: where support is things like fixing bugs that are encountered, producing custom builds with cherry-picked bug fixes, etc. Also, more traditional support around getting it configured in your enterprise and/or migrating your enterprise to new software.
- Feature development: so that the software does what they actually need. (Some places might do this in-house, but usually you'd just contract out to one of the companies that has developers with expertise in the codebase.)
It's a mistake to think that money can only be made by selling a product. In the open source world you generally sell services (which is tough, but there are a few companies in this space).
It's easy to say there's a huge disparity between it and office but I've found it to be more than enough for casual users like myself, and for free too.