Collabora Online moves out of The Document Foundation

Posted Oct 4, 2020 21:30 UTC (Sun) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
In reply to: Collabora Online moves out of The Document Foundation by thumperward
Parent article: Collabora Online moves out of The Document Foundation

> It's worth noting that the AGPL is not something that is typically used on projects which don't have a Web-facing component, for obvious reasons, and that LibreOffice Online both originated with and is almost solely developed by Collabora. So if anyone were in a position to, say, fudge the matter and release the Web-facing source under the AGPL then it's them.

I suppose that's a possibility, but there is also the possibility that they (or anyone else working in this space) simply cease providing source (and binaries) altogether. The regular GPL does not prevent them from moving to SaaS-only model, doing all of their development in private, and never distributing anything.

There are issues of logistics etc. to consider before making such a dramatic shift in one's line of business (as I understand it, they currently sell binaries + tech support, not SaaS), but it's not like this would be totally impractical. In the short term, they could set it up on AWS or GCP, contract out most of the hard work to Amazon or Google, and then it's just a question of price and volume. The downside, of course, is that they would have to try and differentiate themselves from Office 365 and GSuite, which is probably not an easy case to make from a business perspective (i.e. it's the old "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" problem again).

(Disclaimer: I work for Google. One of the services that I help support is related to GSuite, and another is related to GCP. Views are my own.)