SUSE and Collabora Productivity (“Collabora”) today announced a partnership to deliver maintenance and support to SUSE’s LibreOffice customers. Under terms of the agreement, Collabora will begin supporting commercial versions of LibreOffice – a comprehensive, professional-quality productivity suite – ensuring continuity of support for enterprise customers and open source LibreOffice development.
SUSE customers with active LibreOffice subscriptions will continue to receive maintenance and support from SUSE until their subscriptions expire. New LibreOffice customers, as well as SUSE customers who renew their LibreOffice subscriptions, may elect to receive maintenance and support directly from Collabora.
“In transitioning LibreOffice support to Collabora, SUSE is ensuring continuity of excellent support for its customers and providing for ongoing investment from Collabora into LibreOffice,” said Nils Brauckmann, President & General Manager, SUSE. “This transition will allow SUSE to focus on our core Linux and cloud infrastructure businesses, while helping LibreOffice continue its trajectory of growth and usefulness.”
LibreOffice is a community-driven project of the not-for-profit organization The Document Foundation. In addition to providing commercial support for LibreOffice, Collabora is joining The Document Foundation’s Advisory Board alongside SUSE and will assume a more active role in the project.
Philippe Kalaf,CEO, Collabora, said, “Collabora believes Free Software holds great promise in the office suite market, and we look forward to providing supported LibreOffice releases across Windows, Mac and Linux to both existing and new LibreOffice customers worldwide. We will naturally extend our proven consultancy portfolio to include feature development for LibreOffice.”
To ensure continuity of service to enterprise customers and to help with ongoing community support for the LibreOffice project, key SUSE developers working on LibreOffice are joining Collabora, forming its new Productivity division. “As a strong supporter from the very first day, SUSE has contributed so much to get LibreOffice standing on its own feet,” said Florian Effenberger, Chairman, The Document Foundation. “We are truly grateful for all they have contributed, and we are excited to have Collabora join our advisory board and see what great heights the team will reach in the future.”
