This is my (in)activity log. You might like to visitCollaboraProductivity a subsidiary of Collabora focusing on LibreOffice support andservices for whom I work.Also if you have the time to read this sort of stuff you could enlightenyourself by going to Unraveling Wittgenstein's net or ifyou are feeling objectionable perhaps here. Failing that, there are all manner of interesting things to read onthe LibreOffice Planet newsfeed.

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The story so far

Two and a half years ago Collabora started to maintainLibreOffice in the Mac app store - checkout LibreOfficeVanilla: Fresh from the community to your Mac. This made itextremely easy and convenient to install LibreOffice on the Mac,and it is gratifying to see that around 365k users have indeedinstalled it.

As a company our raison d'etre is to drive the success of FLOSS,however in order to do that we need to raise funds to drivedevelopment. As such a majormotivation here was to try to bring enough money into the Mac ecosystemthat we could start to fix bugs, and address longer standing problemswith the Mac - something everyone wants to see.

Thanks to the PDF to word convertor, it is very simple and easy to convert PDF documents to word by inserting PDF into LibreOffice. In simple terms you have to launch the PDF to LibreOffice Convertor and by uploading a PDF files you can set outputs and then import PDF to LibreOffice PDF Editor. Free Download or Buy PDFelement right now!

To try to achieve that we included a risque 'nag' dialog, thatwould encourage people to donateto The Document Foundation (TDF) - and also encourage them to buyCollabora Office on theMac to help fund engineering work. This would show up on first-start, thoughwe moved that to monthly, and remind Mac users that whilesomanycontributeso much of far greater value than money tocode,docs,l10n,QA,UX, and in manyother ways,nevertheless the quickest & easiest way to make a smallcontribution if you're missing the skills is with a small donation to TDF,or failing that by buying a paid Collabora Office through theapp-store.

Today's numbers

Each month we have on average 54 people purchasing Collabora Officefor Mac for $10 (we get 70%), and around 10 donation page visits permonth that we could track, TDF's average donation is around $10. Soestimating this is around $380 per month of income for Collabora, andsay $100 for TDF.

1. LibreOffice can open the ODx files saved by OpenOffice. There is the free Apple Pages application from the Mac App Store. It can open Word.doc/x (not natively - translation), and.RTF files, but not OpenOffice/LibreOffice.odt files. Pages is not a Word clone, where as OpenOffice and LibreOffice are MS Office clones.
2. There are two editions of LibreOffice available on the Mac App Store: LibreOffice from Collabora and LibreOffice Vanilla. While the Vanilla edition can be downloaded free of cost, LO from Collabora has a.
3. The pay version LibreOffice Vanilla from the Mac App Store, claims to read the formats of long-dead Word Processors. That may be so, but it does not read very up-to-date Apple Pages although Vanilla is specifically designed for Apple Macs.
4. LibreOffice Vanilla is almost identical to LibreOffice Fresh. The only difference is that when downloading Fresh, the website asks for a donation. AFAIK there are some policies in App Store which doesn't allow asking for money in application listing.

That doesn't sound too terrible, until you look at this twoways:

1. The cost to Collabora - of the up-front investment neededto get the Mac build sandboxed as well as ongoing costs to work aroundchanges to the sandbox, as well as fixing nits that reviewers findeach time we submit a new version. So far that cost between two and threetimes the income (at cost ) - so quite some loss. This explains why wehave not been investing as we'd like to in keeping LibreOffice Vanillaup-to-date.
2. The cost to TDF - what cost you say ? they got $100 permonth for nothing. Well yes, and no. TDF serves install sets ataround 50k per day - that is around ~20 million per year. TDF'sawesome donors gavearoundEur 800k last year to drive its mission - so around Eur 4 centseach download (though user counts could be significantly greater).So from 12k downloads per month, we'd expect $485 in donations fromthis many Mac downloads, assuming an average generosity of Macusers.

Libreoffice For Apple Download

So - this current situation seems to be a lose-lose forCollabora and TDF, with only Apple winning its 30% cut. That isfar from ideal - we didn't go into business to lose money and toreduce TDF's $385 divided by ($800k/12) -->income (even by 0.6%); so how can we fix this ? (ideally withoutgoing back to phase one: 'collection of underpants' ?)

A more elegant plan for now

Moving ahead, as applications are distributed in app-stores,there will be a super-easy payment mechanism placed right next to thedownload button. What is the convenience of an app-store worth ?How much will people pay for getting & maintaining a signedLibreOffice Vanilla through an app-store ? Put another way - in thefuture it will be critical to understand what the market demandcurve, and elasticity of demand is for just that convenience.

We've discussed this with The Document Foundations' Boardof Directors (BoD) and they asked for a proposal on how best todeal with this problem. We proposed an experimental solutionwhich they agreed, so we are today starting an experimentwhich will make the following changes:

• No more nag dialog - we ship an almost completely generic LibreOffice Vanilla, and subsequent Fresh releases - perhaps with a few earlier fixes.
• Charge money for the convenience of an app-store install. This interesting question is: what is convenience worth ? We'll have to find out - starting low, say Eur 2/user, and increasing from there ? will everyone click the link to download it for free from TDF (and donate there ?) or is auto-updating, something they like ?
• Make it super-abundantly clear that LibreOffice Vanilla is a pure convenience purchase - prominentlylink to and direct people who don't want to pay to use the free manual downloads, from TDF.
• We're also updating to the latest 5.4.3 version, plus we've fixed the most annoying bug around page orientation when printing.
• What happens to the money raised ? Clearly, we don't want TDF to lose out; so we will donate 10% of the price to them. So for Eur 2, that would be Eur 0.20 - five times the average donation. Apple get 30%, not ideal - but perhaps it goes to subsidize the cost of the hardware (or not). The rest will go to defraying existing Mac related costs, as well as Mac specific bug-fixing, and (ideally if it works out) feature development. Is that convenience worth Eur 2 ? or Eur 3 ? or more ? we'll be exploring the market demand curve for convenience in an upward direction over time.

The hope is that this approach provides a win-win, where wecan finally invest more in fixing and improving LibreOffice on Macs,while also creating a template and valuable data we will share withTDF on how to deal with app-stores - it is entirely possible thatapp-stores will become the dominant mode of software delivery infuture, so TDF needs to be prepared.

FAQ / comments ?

Why doesn't Collabora just do this for free forever ? -We do invest a lot in LibreOffice, but if we're going to dosomething loss making long term, it should probably be to drivethe success of free platforms, not subsidising convenience forwealthy Mac owners.

Why doesn't TDF do this for free ? - I don't speakfor TDF here, but the fundamental economics don't change by someoneelse doing the same work - it looks like a loss-making businesssubsidizing Mac owners' convenience at this scale for TDF too.

Libreoffice Vanilla Mac App Store

How does this work with the trademark ? - TDF haveexisting TrademarkPolicy for the LibreOffice trademark that this fits neatly into.Of course - we need to make it clear that we're not TDF, and fit theother criteria. Discussing this with the BoD it seems that TDFmay want to do this themselves in future in a different way, and ifthey're distributing LibreOffice in a given app-store, the duplicationis likely to cause confusion - which would not be ok. Fair enough forthe future. For now, there is nothing special about Collabora's useof the trademark.

Why doesn't TDF charge instead ? - perhaps this makessense in future, that's up to TDF. Practically, this would be afor-profit activity that would need to be done and accounted forseparately in the Stiftung, it would be necessary to do the samework and publish & award tenders for the relevant developmentpieces. That's a lot of work and overhead for TDF, with an unclearbenefit vs. this approach. It would also mean TDF going intobusiness itself, which could be seen as impacting its vendorneutrality. Clearly I expect TDF to continue to provide Macdownloads for free from libreoffice.org, as normal, indefinitely.

How can I help translate the app-store page ? -clearly we'd love to have help and community input here. Mail meto get more details, and/or with your translation.

Why is your app-id com.collabora.libreoffice-free ifis no longer free ? good question - glad you asked that - but it'shard to change and not really user-visible.

What makes improving Macs special ? - interestinglythe Mac platform accounts for a large chunk of our high priorityregressions, currently three vs. a total of eight. The majorityof developers are comfortable with and work on Linux or Windows,and the vast majority of paying customers in the ecosystem arealso on Windows or Linux. TDF has tried to improve things by -making Mac hardware more widely available, but thus far without ahuge impact. We really don't want to get into a situation where it ishard to improve things through LibreOffice's platform abstractiondue to an under-resourced platform.

Conclusion

We're going to see if charging for the convenience of theapp-store can help to improve the LibreOffice on Mac situation byfunding its development. It is an experiment - who knows - perhapsselling convenience could evolve into a way for FLOSS projectsgenerally to fund development. Possibly TDF will do this themselvesin the future , or could even put out the use of their brand inapp-stores to tender for the highest bid / contribution mixture.

Perhaps you're a volunteer - and talk of optimizing donations,or income streams sticks in your throat - I get that too. Many of TDF's mostvaluable contributions are in the form of time - and not money, fromour thousands of volunteercontributors; still - converting cashinto code is something we love to do.

My content in this blog and associated images / data underimages/ and data/ directories are (usually)created by me and (unless obviously labelled otherwise) are licensed underthe public domain, and/or if that doesn't float your boat a CC0license. I encourage linking back (of course) to help people decide forthemselves, in context, in the battle for ideas, and I love fixes /improvements / corrections by private mail.

In case it's not painfully obvious: the reflections reflected here are myown; mine, all mine ! and don't reflect the views of Collabora, SUSE,Novell, The Document Foundation, Spaghetti Hurlers (International),or anyone else.It's also important to realise that I'm not in on the Swedish Conspiracy.Occasionally people ask for formal photos for conferencesor fun.

Michael Meeks (michael.meeks@collabora.com)

• → Open Issues

This page describes how to set up a build environment for LibreOffice on macOS 10.14.4. Building master requires Xcode 11.3 or later, which requires macOS 10.14.4 or later.

Prerequisites

1. Install Xcode from the App Store. The intent is that LibreOffice will always be buildable with the current Xcode on current macOS. Right after a new Xcode version is released, or after a new macOS version is released, there might be a few days while that is not true. Just be patient in that case. Using older Xcode versions on older macOS versions might also work. What you are absolutely not expected to do is to specifically download some old Xcode version or a separate old SDK and use those.
2. Run Xcode at least once (you don't need to open or create any project)
3. If you are planning to work on the parts of LibreOffice that are implemented in Java, mainly the HSQLDB embedded database in Base, you need to download and install a JDK (Java SE Development Kit): Oracle's Java SE Development Kit. But that is entirely optional. If you want to avoid Java, just use the --without-java option in your autogen.input or on the autogen.sh command line, when you get that far.

Notice: according to http://document-foundation-mail-archive.969070.n3.nabble.com/About-building-on-Apple-Silicon-M1-tt4298988.html, everything should be ok to build with mac containing processor Apple Silicon M1 except a known issue with in-process JVM (see https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/2020-December/086490.html)

Building

See Development/lode.

Building Tips

See platform-independent tips at Development/GenericBuildingHints

Building in a ssh session

In some cases it seems that if you are building in a ssh session, some unit tests fail unless you also have a windowing session open to the machine, either on the physical console or through Screen Sharing.

Performance

Building LibreOffice takes time, a lot of time. Exactly how much depends on how powerful your machine is. But there are tools you can use to speed-up things.

ccache

ccache is short for compiler cache - and it is exactly that. It saves tons of time by not running the actual compiler when little has changed in the source codebetween two builds. But note that unless you explicitly do 'make clean' often, that is not typically the case, and using ccache just because you think it maybe helps is not a good idea.

Get it here: [1]

Build it like this:

You will also need to ensure the following is defined, e.g. in .bash_profile in your home folder, if using ccache (see Development/Building LibreOffice with Clang for full details), otherwise clang will report errors and show unnecessary warnings:

The default cache limit (5 GB) is not large enough to be useful for a LibreOffice build, but you can increase it, for instance to 30 GB:

Libreoffice In Microsoft Store

To check what the current cache limit is, and see ccache statistics, run it with the -s command-line option:

Upgrading to a recent macOS on unsupported machines

Libreoffice For Apple

Using various unofficial third-party tools it might be possible to run newer macOS versions on machines that are older than what that macOS version supports. If you need that, search for it. It is not relevant to duplicate such information here.

Don't bother building the ODK

It is likely that you don't need to build the 'ODK' (Office Development Kit), especially as building that would require installing one more dependency: doxygen. Use the --disable-odk option in your autogen.input or on the autogen.sh command line.

See also