A couple of thoughts:

Many enterprises are moving away from thick client office software and moving to browser based office software with cloud backends. Google apps, Zoho, OnlyOffice, Bitrix, and Microsoft all have very usable cloud offerings. Collabora is trying to build an LibreOffice based cloud offering, but LibreOfice remains old-style "thick client" software.

Apache OpenOffice is still available and free. LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice, and gained marketshare by building goodwill with users who did not trust Oracle or (to a much lesser extent) the Apache Foundation.

Having three "enterprise" partners to buy from makes it hard. I don't have a business relationship with CIB, Collabora, or Adfinis SyGroup, and honestly, I don't know why packaged office software would require one.

In short, I think there's a deep marketing problem here, and a misunderstanding of something fundamentally different about free software (using the Stallman meaning): it is possible to have widely used software that is critical to a user, but where that user is not willing to pay for it. This is because the user selected it because it was free (as in freedom) and the user knows they do not have to cooperate with a market capture by a developer.

Given the sheer number of companies still using Office 2010 or 2007 or older, thick clients aren't the problem.

A huge part of the LibreOffice value proposition is price. And choosing free LibreOffice over paid Office is a lot easier than choosing a paid option. Once you open the conversation about paying, Office is a no-brainer and you need a compelling reason to switch to something else.

Hard agree for businesses. Office just isn't that expensive anymore, especially if you're in the MS ecosystem already.

Old style. Sure.

Thick? Stuff that runs in the browser definitely uses more memory and CPU cycles.

There's a huge difference in resources between XWindow servers and the new Electron based applications.

>Apache Foundation

I can understand Oracle, but why Apache?

I don't think that there's a problem trusting the Apache Foundation. I think that under the Apache Foundation's supervision, OpenOffice did nearly nothing in the last five years, while LibreOffice fixed bugs and added features.

There is a long history of open source projects going to Apache being like sending an old racehorse 'to the farm'.

Libre office was actually created earlier, while Sun was still at the helm. When Oracle took over it got more mindshare only a short bit later Oracle "donated" it to the ASF.

The fear was the product would not advance.

Is this really a problem for businesses though? My experience is they're generally pretty conservative when it comes to upgrades.

Yes, in cases like this (no foss office is on-par by quality and functionality w/ Microsoft Office).

From their blog:

> For enterprise-class deployments, TDF has strongly recommended the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners – for desktop, mobile and cloud – with long-term support options, professional assistance, custom features and other benefits, including SLA (Service Level Agreements).

My company doesn't need this. We just need a program do open documents and spreadsheets. We don't need an ecosystem, we don't need their cloud, we don't need mobile suppoet, custom features, "professional assistance" or SLAs.

> Despite this recommendation, an increasing number of enterprises have chosen the version supported by volunteers over the version optimized for their needs.

Let that sink in for a second. Basically TDF is saying "we know what's best for you - it's paying us for things you don't need".

It's completely tone-deaf and I'm seriously considering creating a fork called FuckTDF-Suite with everything being identical except removing all mentions of "Community", "Enterprise", and donation prompts.

First Elastic, now this. If you're just salty about not getting money and don't care about the principles of free software, go sell your soul and work for M$FT or Goolag.

It might be tone deaf they way they did it but it is a real problem.

I've nothing against small groups doing a bit of guerrilla marketing, like one that showed up in a post share earlier this weekend along the lines of: "this program is shared under thr MIT and the GPL license but with the social expectation <something something>".

If we want to release out main product as open source we cannot expect to become wildly profitable, but at the same time we as developers should get better at advocating for such projects with our managers and our customers.

I often do that when there is something the company I work for need and depend on: I look for support contracts etc. Usually this works great, once devs ignored me and changed the rules after we signed up (handsontable I think), which is of course annoying.

If your company is not clogging up their community support forums then you are not the intended audience for this.

The project provides an open source MS Office replacement for free, not an IT department.

Their community support forums are for home users, not the accounts department stuck trying to balance the end of year spreadsheet. Pay for their "enterprise" support if it is business critical, or buy MS Office and see how much end user support you get with that.