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. LibreOffice has evolved so much that Vignoli feels “it’s not comparable with what we inherited from Oracle or OpenOffice some seven years ago.” It started to implement new features, improve compatibility with Microsoft Office and introduce new UI. The LibreOffice community worked hard and finally, LibreOffice was liberated from all that code.
Vignoli told me that there is no point in introducing new features or working on a new UI until the code has been cleaned up and modernized. But because LibreOffice inherited software that needed a lot of cleaning, many initial releases of LibreOffice were dedicated to cleaning up the code base. I recall people used to complain about the lack of new features and new UI as compared to Microsoft Office. Evolution of LibreOffice in these 7 years