“Initially when the project started, we were a very small team. But in general, there are around 300 active contributors every month.Īnd that’s where TDF wants to invest its resources, including financial. Some volunteers make a commit and then don’t do anything for a few weeks or months. Vignoli said that there are over 1,200 volunteers that contribute to the project, but not all are active. Still, LibreOffice manages to release a major version every six months. The downside is that because volunteers work in their free time, LibreOffice can’t move as fast as a product run by a private company with a dedicated development team. A huge amount of contributions come from volunteers, which means they don’t have to invest resources in developing the software code. Since its early days, LibreOffice has been a community-driven project. So where is the money being spent? Focus shifting from product to community That said, TDF is very conservative when it comes to using this money. Last year registered a 15 percent year-over-year increase in donations. Vignoli told me that they have over €1 million in revenue from various sources out of that amount, around €800,000 is from individual donations. A surprisingly large portion of revenue comes from individual contributions. However, unlike many other foundations, there is no multi-tier membership where TDF gets a big chunk of money from ‘gold’ or ‘platinum’ members. The advisory board also became a source of revenue for TDF members have to pay a fee to join. Later on, many other companies and organizations joined the board, including Intel, AMD, Gnome Foundation and KDE e.V. Initially, Google, SUSE, Red Hat and Free Software Foundation joined the advisory board.

In 2011, TDF created an advisory board for companies and organizations to work together on the development of the project. Collabora has been instrumental in bringing many features to LibreOffice, including collaborative editing. However, later on, many SUSE developers moved to Collabora Productivity, a company that offers solutions based on LibreOffice. SUSE used to be the largest contributor, followed by Red Hat and Canonical.

Many companies dedicated developer resources to continue the development of LibreOffice. When LibreOffice was announced, almost all major desktop Linux distributions switched from OpenOffice to LibreOffice as the default office suite.

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