I’m not sure why you’re getting downvoted but somebody else has posted an excellent LWN article about the Libreoffice enterprise licensing issue and one of the biggest problems faced by LibreOffice commercial proponents is that MS has historically provided such lousy (non existent) support that people have started believing that it’s absolutely all right for your office suite to have little to no support. Even in enterprise environments. But you would not expect such poor support from any other software, especially if you were paying $100/yr for it, or a few hundreds for a perpetual license.

Yes I think people are commenting and downvoting without any context on what has led to this - people are not in fact happy to pay for support and think they’re fine without it.

Maybe it's different with less sophisticated users, but I can't tell you the last time I went to a company for support on a commercial desktop product. I've either found the answer to a problem by searching or I figure the problem will be fixed (or not) at some point. In general dealing with support is going to take me a bunch of time without a useful result.

Last year I bought an office licence through work and bought a laptop which came with a trial of office preinstalled. I tried activating the trial with my bought license but no dice. I tried uninstalling the trial, didn’t work. I ended up calling MS support and they remotes into the laptop, with my authorisation, cleaned up the trial with a special removal tool and got me up and running.

Now ok the problem was caused by them in the first place, but support was easy up contact, I didn’t wait long and they fixed the problem.

Corporations use a lot of fancy tech like Citrix, VDIs, remote application management software, securuty software, etc. They can often end up with weird problems with software compatibility and need vendor support.

Yes but especially in a corporate setting you may be receiving those documents regularly. Maybe it’s a supplier who has a particular format, or a customer who sends their designs in a certain document.

Or maybe HR receives resumes and a certain percentage don’t open because of a bug.

Then there’s stuff beyond bugs. There’s training and migration for people who’ve been using MS Office all their lives. There’s early access to RCs. There’s support if you want to learn how to deploy within your enterprise rules. Maybe your enterprise gives employees locked down laptops and the way their laptops are locked down prevents a new update from working.

Finally, you may have migrated and would like to use a portion of the money you’re saving by switching away from the Microsoft solution (which is significantly more expensive for enterprises) to keep the solution that allows you to save that money supported.

It is if your org has 1000+ plus users. At that scale you don't admin IT any longer, you define requiremwnts and buy IT services.

Put it turns out people actually don’t do this for office suites... that’s the context of this story. Collabra haven’t had a new LibreOffice support client since 2018. Enterprises they try and sell to say they don’t use or want support and don’t understand the proposition.

As is pointed out, Collabra hasn’t had a new support client since 2018, but other companies have had support clients. These companies sell libreoffice clients under the name libreoffice, unlike Collabra, and don’t actually contribute back to the project, but basically just open support tickets relying on upstream devs to provide support for free, while they undercut the companies providing support for the project.

While morally questionable. Philosophically; Why is this a problem? I suppose I could provide enterprise support for Bash or Midnight Commander without contributing back to these software projects.

What if I don't know how to install the software to begin with?

Or maybe there was a power outage and I "lost" the latest version of that important presentation I was working on, then closed out of the recovery window—how can I get back to where I was?

What if I forget my online credentials?

What if a document isn't formatted like I expect it to be, because I'm using the application wrong?

How do people use MS Office and Google Docs without encountering these kind of problems? Maybe they aren't problems in practice, or people just work around in practice. As I said, if a document doesn't look right then what am I going to do? Open a support ticket and wait for a new version of the software? Does anyone really do that?

Note that the question I'm asking is the same question that the LibreOffice themselves are panicking about!

https://lwn.net/Articles/825602/

Microsoft sells an entire software system (actually multiple such software systems) that are expensive, and require CALs (per user licensing) and server licensing simply to deploy software.

Microsoft also provides many different ways to install/deploy Office products for enterprises. In fact, one of the biggest selling point of the O365 enterprise tier is flexibility in deployment/installation options.

Well, from my experience at Fortune 500s, they do encounter these problems, but they're supported by internal IT departments. As developers (I just assume everyone on HN is one by default), we aren't really the intended audience. If office products are essential to your job, having someone to support you when your presentation is messed up (or even blame) is really important.

Collabora's support model allows companies to outsource that support responsibility, similar to http://electric.ai/

Does it make financial sense for their users? I don't know. But I can see the value proposition for someone making office software purchasing decisions, especially if they're concerned about a lesser-known brand like LibreOffice, or think open source software is inherently less reliable.

Vulnerability fixes, post upgrade support, bug fixes.

How many millions of people use MS Office and Google Docs with absolutely no support?

I fear they are misunderstanding how commoditised office software has become.

Enterprise is a different beast. They require someone to call when something goes wrong. It might not ever go wrong, but having the contract is still important.

Most individuals don’t need anything like this type of support. But if you’re a large company or government, it’s required.

> But if you’re a large company or government, it’s required.

Even the LibreOffice people agree it doesn't really seem to be required. Hence their panic.

> 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. Or a giant Pharma company in the news right now; companies do it left & right.

Spreadsheet processing and coding up customized formula could cost a lot of time I imagine, it could require a technical programmer with experience using the software.