NeoOffice: When is free not free?

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NeoOffice: When is free not free?

30 April 2011 2,861 views 9 Comments

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Is an application still free or, for that matter, open source if you have to pay for support? NeoOffice, a popular Mac-only OpenOffice variant, has changed its support policy to favor existing donors and that has some users in an uproar. Are they right to be angry?

NeoOffice was created and is maintained by Planamesa, a private company. Yes, the codebase is OpenOffice, but the attractive Mac user interface and Mac-specific features didn’t just fall from the sky — somebody had to write that code and, well, people gotta eat.

That said, Planamesa recently announced the following changes to their NeoOffice support policy:

The NeoOffice project is funded entirely by donations from our users. Since most of our donations come from a small percentage of our users, we give top priority to answering any problems posted by our most generous donors in our NeoOffice forums… Users who have donated US$100 (or €70 or £60 or CA$100 or AU$100 or ¥8334) or more within the last year can post in any of our NeoOffice forums. Also, any NeoOffice Mobile users who have donated US$10 (or €7 or £6 or CA$10 or AU$10 or ¥834) or more within the last year can post in our NeoOffice Mobile forums.

Some users are very much up in arms over the change — see MacUpdate — and there seems to be a real disconnect between what some of them are saying and the apparent facts. That is, the app is still free, there’s a community of support and then there’s what isn’t free anymore.

This seems very similar to the support policies of other commercial companies that make and support open source software, such Ubuntu.

Nevertheless, NeoOffice has been my backup productivity suite for years — what I turn to when TextEdit and/or iWork won’t open/edit a document — and that won’t change with this news.

Is Planamesa breaking GPL? Are they wrong to “charge” for support?

Inquiring minds want to know…

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9 Comments »

Gerald Shields said:

Honestly, no because support costs was never covered under the GNU Lesser General Public License or LGPL. Technically, NeoOffice is free as is OpenOffice and LibreOffice, but I guess now you have to pay for support.

# 30 April 2011 at 1:13 pm

Viswakarma said:

Support costs money!!! I support the new policy of Planamesa.

# 30 April 2011 at 2:05 pm

John Davis said:

Basically, this is a clone of the MS Office Suite, right?

Office is ghastly, bloated, buggy software.

Sure it was good 20 years ago. But now it’s horrible.

Why anyone would want to run an imitation of this, I can’t imagine.

I rest my case.

# 1 May 2011 at 7:01 am

Mark said:

I’m a strong supporter of NeoOffice. Yes, I donated $100 to them, but not for support or anything else, I like the app. It is a strong contender in the Office app market and the efforts of the authors has been Herculean. Unlike OpenOffice or it’s other versions, NeoOffice is designed with the Mac in mind, not an afterthought.

The whiners who haven’t supported the app with their own funds have little right to complain. The app is free, access to the boards are free, they just don’t get direct support. I fail to understand why this is a problem. You get what you pay for. In my case, I don’t believe the access to the forums is worth $100. I do believe the app is worth that money so I donated. I want to see development continue. I want to see them not only fix bugs, but improve the product. Currently, they are already working on Lion computability.

Free is a wonderful thing, but everything costs money and there is no free lunch. I’m proud to be one of the supporters of NeoOffice. It’s like public radio, everyone can have it and I help make that happen. Oh, and John, your case is weak.

# 1 May 2011 at 5:21 pm

Pedant said:

Yes, it is technically “free as in free software”.

Free-as-in-beer software where you have the option to pay for support is *exactly* what the FSF and Richard Stallman propose as a business model.

Planamesa are not breaking the GPL, they are using it *exactly* as its author intended.

You don’t have to pay for support, but then again, no-one has to fix your problems for you either.

# 1 May 2011 at 10:57 pm

Kurien said:

WHole heartedly support donation. 100$ support is bit too high considering the fact that open office fetures for asianlanguages are not fully ported yet.
Hope they urgently implemented conjuct formation of characters.

# 2 May 2011 at 2:42 am

Bob said:

Um, it isn’t just the support you’ve got to pay for; it is the software itself. And I don’t think Stallman quite had that in mind!

# 30 May 2011 at 4:54 am

Spade said:

A “required donation” is no longer a donation – it is a charge for services rendered. As Planamesa are a registered non-profit entity, the fact that they are now unambiguously charging for services is a serious problem. As they sow, so shall they reap.

http://macsmarticles.blogspot.com/2011/04/planamesa-charges-for-neooffice-32.html

# 11 June 2011 at 6:05 pm

NeoOffice 3.2.1 adds Lion Versions, Fullscreen, Resume modes | FairerPlatform said:

[...] this year, Fairer Platform asked When is free not free?, but the answer remains elusive. Some folks have already voted with their feet, but I suspect they [...]

# 31 August 2011 at 1:02 am