- #MICROSOFT OFFICE VS OPENOFFICE SOFTWARE#
- #MICROSOFT OFFICE VS OPENOFFICE CODE#
- #MICROSOFT OFFICE VS OPENOFFICE FREE#
"In Europe, you can have 200 contributors and they will cover the whole Europe, but in India considering the size of the country, you need a larger base. “It’s actually more challenging to build an impactful community in a huge country like India than in Europe," Vignoli said. They participate in open source events around the globe to meet new people, create new collaborations and attract more developers to the project.Īs a result of these activities, they are experiencing massive growth in countries like India, Japan and Taiwan. Like many open source projects, TDF originated in Europe, but it doesn’t want to remain a European-based project. TDF also invests resources in building communities globally. Whenever someone makes their first contribution to LibreOffice, the developer mentor reaches out to that person and provides them with all the info that they need to get up to speed in a short time. They have a full-time developer mentor whose sole job is to encourage new contributors. But now the product is stable and mature and we can look at building a community around it,” said Vignoli. Our focus was on getting the project ready, we didn’t have time and resources to build a community around it. “Initially when the project started, we were a very small team. But in general, there are around 300 active contributors every month.Īnd that’s where TDF wants to invest its resources, including financial. Some volunteers make a commit and then don’t do anything for a few weeks or months. Vignoli said that there are over 1,200 volunteers that contribute to the project, but not all are active. Still, LibreOffice manages to release a major version every six months.
#MICROSOFT OFFICE VS OPENOFFICE FREE#
The downside is that because volunteers work in their free time, LibreOffice can’t move as fast as a product run by a private company with a dedicated development team.
#MICROSOFT OFFICE VS OPENOFFICE SOFTWARE#
A huge amount of contributions come from volunteers, which means they don’t have to invest resources in developing the software code. Since its early days, LibreOffice has been a community-driven project. So where is the money being spent? Focus shifting from product to community That said, TDF is very conservative when it comes to using this money. Last year registered a 15 percent year-over-year increase in donations. Vignoli told me that they have over €1 million in revenue from various sources out of that amount, around €800,000 is from individual donations. A surprisingly large portion of revenue comes from individual contributions. However, unlike many other foundations, there is no multi-tier membership where TDF gets a big chunk of money from ‘gold’ or ‘platinum’ members. The advisory board also became a source of revenue for TDF members have to pay a fee to join. Later on, many other companies and organizations joined the board, including Intel, AMD, Gnome Foundation and KDE e.V. Initially, Google, SUSE, Red Hat and Free Software Foundation joined the advisory board. In 2011, TDF created an advisory board for companies and organizations to work together on the development of the project. Collabora has been instrumental in bringing many features to LibreOffice, including collaborative editing. However, later on, many SUSE developers moved to Collabora Productivity, a company that offers solutions based on LibreOffice. SUSE used to be the largest contributor, followed by Red Hat and Canonical. Many companies dedicated developer resources to continue the development of LibreOffice. When LibreOffice was announced, almost all major desktop Linux distributions switched from OpenOffice to LibreOffice as the default office suite. LibreOffice has evolved so much that Vignoli feels “it’s not comparable with what we inherited from Oracle or OpenOffice some seven years ago.” It started to implement new features, improve compatibility with Microsoft Office and introduce new UI. The LibreOffice community worked hard and finally, LibreOffice was liberated from all that code.
#MICROSOFT OFFICE VS OPENOFFICE CODE#
Vignoli told me that there is no point in introducing new features or working on a new UI until the code has been cleaned up and modernized. But because LibreOffice inherited software that needed a lot of cleaning, many initial releases of LibreOffice were dedicated to cleaning up the code base. I recall people used to complain about the lack of new features and new UI as compared to Microsoft Office. Evolution of LibreOffice in these 7 years