Hi,
I’m not a fan of the “Personal Edition” label cause it suggests for personal use only and this is not true. Otherwise LibreOffice is in the same league as www.freeoffice.com. I never used freeoffice but from the images it looks better than LibreOffice.
I also don’t know what’s the goal or the strategy of the change. Is it:
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Bring TDF and Ecosystem partners closer together so that on the LibreOffice web page show the free edition and the enterprise edition. So that enterprises can directly contact the ecosystem partners?
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Offer a free edition for personal use only and for all other enterprise editions?
The difference between 1 and 2 is that in 1 it will be easier for the user to get in contact with enterprises. In 2 you say private use is free everything else you have to pay. When you choose 2. than TDF will get issues with donations, cause personal users will say, enterprises pay the development, why I should donate. In addition no. 2 TDF will have issues with the community contributors. For example I’m not interested in contributing to personal use software.
So please define the goals. If the goal is that ecosystem partners don’t get enough enterprises that will pay for developing LibreOffice. Communicate it. For example wikipedia sayed years ago the project is so important but they get not enough donations to maintain the project. You have to say, we need money. When you don’t say something nobody will change.
If you choose strategy 1, I would use not Personal Edition for the label. For example:
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OpenSuse and Suse Linux Enterprise
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Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise
All 4 distributions are for personal and enterprise use, but as an enterprise I wouldn’t run OpenSuse on a (critical) server, I would choose SLES and pay for it. As a university with an IT Department I would choose maybe OpenSuse on the desktops cause It’s for free and the support will be done by the IT Department. ANY distribution that will be used widely has an Personal Edition. Ubuntu, one of the famoused distributions, didn’t separate at all, which is one of the reasons that it’s so popular. For sure they make money with other stuff.
As the Personal Edition will be released by TDF and the other editions by ecosystem partners, I’m for:
- LibreOffice community edition vs. LibreOffice enterprise edition
This makes it clear that in the community edition you don’t have any “support” from an ecosystem partner. And the enterprise edition you can have support for whatever an ecosystem partner offers (LTS, user support, …)
Regina wrote in the design chat that the French government chose for there LibreOffice support an enterprise that didn’t contribute back to LibreOffice, this isn’t good.
When TDF offers an LibreOffice community edition French government can use this release but if the government chooses support from an ecosystem partner the government will use LibreOffice enterprise edition. Which means it’s a selling point for our ecosystem partners.
What I was saying is, when you work in the IT department you need a selling point why someone should choose the enterprise edition. With Personal Edition there is no choice, cause as government you have to use enterprise edition. With community and enterprise edition the IT department can say do I want to have support yes/no. Does an ecosystem partner offer me a good offer for my company needs?
cheers
Andreas_k