SUSE Forms Partnership to Support LibreOffice

SUSE, the entity behind the popular Linux distributions of similar handles, yesterday made an interesting announcement. In a press release, SUSE announced its LibreOffice team would be teaming up with Collabora Productivity to support LibreOffice commercially. Meeks, one of the driving forces behind LibreOffice development and Novell employee, said LibreOffice development is at the perfect place to increase their commercial interests.

In Meeks' blog post he said:

We've got LibreOffice 4.1 released, and a great minor point release in 4.1.1 out, so the release schedule is calming down. I fully expect this to have exactly zero impact on LibreOffice's time based release schedule. So - as you can see, I'm excited about this. I'm convinced that this is the right business decision for SUSE. It will allow Collabora's Productivity division to focus exclusively on driving LibreOffice into Windows, Mac and Consulting markets that are peripheral to SUSE. It will also retain the core of the existing skill base for the benefit of SUSE's customers, and the wider LibreOffice community, of which openSUSE is an important part.

Charles-H. Schulz also reassured users that this partnership is a good move for all involved including The Document Foundation, on whose board Collabora now sits. Schulz also cautioned readers to not take this "news as the sign of the upcoming demise of the LibreOffice project. This is very far from being the case." He continues by explaining that The Document Foundation was formed to prevent any one company from taking over the LibreOffice project and assure no departure would mean the end. For example, he said, "Today the Document Foundation has its own release engineering team and has its own infrastructure. We do not rely on third party sponsors or on the benevolent will of one company for any of this. This simply means that if the sky falls tomorrow, we will still be up and running no matter what change in affiliations could happen then."

So for those worried that this might not be a good thing for regular users and other distributions, Meeks and Schulz say this is a win/win/win for everybody.