LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation

Re:LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation by dangus on Sunday April 05, 2026 @06:03PM (#47654381)

I don’t think they’re considering it a commercial endeavor, they’re just acknowledging that complex open source projects often require paid work to effectively maintain and develop them.

The GNU project works because it’s a bunch of small packages that are each maintained by approximately one person each for free on their spare time.

LibreOffice is a complex office suite that essentially competes with a multi-billion dollar industry of complex office applications and services.

It’s also an open source project that has pretty much always depended on corporate sponsorship and a paid variant rather than having some other form financial backing (e.g., it never went the Wikipedia route of being completely free for everyone and only surviving on donations).

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Re:LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation by hackze on Sunday April 05, 2026 @06:12PM (#47654472)

Do you consider GNU Emacs a small package?

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Re:LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation by Seattle3503 on Sunday April 05, 2026 @06:44PM (#47654710)

I don't think they were talking about the size of the codebase. How much funding does emacs require to maintain?

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Re:LibreOffice – Let's put an end to the speculation by dangus on Monday April 06, 2026 @06:02PM (#47667872)

If a text editor is not smaller than an office suite that handles Excel spreadsheets, PDFs, Word, PowerPoint, and Access databases, I made the right choice never using it.

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