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Why don't more Desktop as a Service organizations get together and refine LibreOffice to heavily compete against Microsoft?

It clearly works; look at other open source solutions that are a collaborative effort. Linux as a whole, Python, Ruby, OpenStack, etc.

4 comments

LibreOffice's codebase is enormous and complicated. It's being cleaned up, but it may still be hard to maintain. It's doable, of course, but if you implement too much Office compatibility, you risk Microsoft suing you for some frivolous patent they keep just for the purpose of crushing LibreOffice when it becomes a threat.

It's interesting how the downvoting of comments critical to Microsoft is time-related (down trends around noon and midnight UTC, up trends shifted about 6 hours). One day I'll have to write a bot to check up/down votes and relate them to sentiment.

The demographics may prove interesting.

to say nothing about downvoting of comments that are made to the wrong comments ;-)

That should teach me not to post right before going to bed.

The biggest problem is that clients WANT Microsoft Office. You can offer them something else (Apple iWork, Lotus Symphony, Open Office, LibreOffice, KOffice). It can do everything they need and they will still argue that MS Office is what they want because of a myriad of factors (training, familiarity, computability, etc).

Some people might be able to shave off some customers, but you are going to have to have some killer feature (even if it is price).

I like your idea but you'd have to do some hard marketing work to get customers to use it in my opinion. That might not be cheaper than this lawsuit ;p

Well, I'm pretty sure all the money of those companies would not be enough to get LibreOffice to become 100% compliant with MS Office formats in a timely manner. Those formats represent decades of features, bugs, fixes and quirks that would have to be replicated in order to make sure that LibreOffice can replace MS Office in all its uses.

Let's assume it costs $5/month per instance of Office 2000-Whatever. It's really more than that with the MS ASP licensing, but let's use $5 for round number sake. Let's also assume they have 500K users using Office, also what I would consider a conservative number.

That's $2.5 Million/month in licensing costs alone. That pays for quite a bit of developer time.

The real question is, could Office be cloned for less than the user cost of Office? It almost certainly can't be cloned for less than Microsoft's cost to make Office.

Has Linux cost more than Windows Core to build? In dollars or time?