The Document Foundation, the organization that develops the open source productivity suite LibreOffice, decided to start charging for one version of the software.
The open source application LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice and is offered for free under the Mozilla Public License Version 2.0 (Mozilla Public License Version 2.0). One Monday's message from the Document Foundation reveals that the organization will start charging €8,99 per software sold through Apple's Mac App Store. This amount is defined as a "convenience fee ... to be invested in supporting the development of the LibreOffice project".
According to the announcement, the payment in the Mac App Store it will be ideal for "end users who want to acquire desktop software from Apple's proprietary sales channel." Free downloads of LibreOffice for macOS from the foundation's website will remain available and will be arguably superior to the App Store offering because this version will include Java.
The Document Foundation reports that Apple doesn't allow dependencies in its store, so it can't include Java in the €8,99 offer. The version now on sale in the App Store replaces an earlier offer by open source support company Collabora, which charged $10 for a “Vanilla” version of the suite with three years of support.
Foundation marketing manager Italo Vignoli said the change is part of a "new marketing strategy".
“The Document Foundation focuses on community edition circulation, while the Companies they are focused on long-term supported releases aimed at enterprises,” says Vignoli. "The award aims to educate organizations to support FOSS work by choosing the production-optimized version of LibreOffice supported by professional services rather than the community version supported by volunteers."
"The goal is to meet the needs of individual and corporate users in the best possible way," said Vignoli, before admitting that "we know that the positive effects of the change will not be visible for some time. Educating businesses about FOSS (Free and open-source software) is no small task, and we've just started taxiby us in this direction".
