A new LibreOffice strategic marketing plan

[Posted July 15, 2020 by corbet]

LWN recently covered the effort within the LibreOffice project to find ways to support the companies doing the bulk of the development work. The project has now posted a revised marketing plan [PDF] with a number of changes, including the removal of the "personal edition" name. Regarding LibreOffice Online: "Following our normal development process, the Ecosystem will release their own versions in their own timing, allowing some features to reach their Enterprise versions before they are subsequently shipped in TDF builds (this allows the Ecosystem to positively differentiate by contributing new features & functionality)".

So the Enterprise version is less stable?

Posted Jul 16, 2020 5:06 UTC (Thu) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (1 responses)

This seems a bit backwards. It’s more usual, both in software and other fields of technology, for new features to be first tried in mid-range products, with the professional or enterprise version being somewhat more conservative. The feature can graduate to pro use once it has proven its worth and been refined a bit.

So the Enterprise version is less stable?

Posted Jul 16, 2020 8:08 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Is that "new things being tried" or "requested features being rolled out"?

Going back to WordPerfect (again), there's a reason it grew from obscurity to 40% of the market over maybe 5 years to 1995. They were responsive to customer demand for new features.

Okay. now things are more mature there are fewer features to add, but this is the route the professional/enterprise version should go down - if you pay support or buy a licenced version, your voice as a *customer*, not a free rider, gets you people working on feature requests. And isn't that the way Wine works? Or Ghostscript? Stuff drops down into the public version from the supported version.

And actually, that's the way a lot of commercial software works :-) Either advertised by pirated versions, or old versions are sold cheap with the intention of pushing upgrades ...

Cheers,
Wol