The Document Foundation, the entity responsible for the development of the open source office suite LibreOffice, has announced its arrival in the world’s most profitable application store, Apple’s Mac App Store, and… made it a paid application course.

Specifically, any macOS user who wishes to purchase LibreOffice from the Mac App Store must pay $8.99/EUR it costs one payment, the amount of which will be used “to support the development of the LibreOffice project,” explains Italo Vignoli, president of The Document Foundation. This initiative is an evolution of the previous strategy of “finding a balanced business model”, where each release of the set was split into two different versions.

So that LibreOffice on macOS users who wish can continue to download from the project site free community versionwhile business and professional users will have an enterprise version optimized for production deployment with long-term release support and access to additional support services.

It should be noted that in practice, in addition to the extended support of some versions, community and corporate LibreOffice are exactly the same. The only difference in favor of the Community Edition is that it includes Java, a dependency that the Mac App Store apps don’t allow. Otherwise, both versions are built from the same source code.

LibreOffice on the Mac App Store

The Document Foundation thanks Collabora, the company that until now has been in charge of marketing versions of LibreOffice in various app stores, including the Mac App Store, now that they have taken over from them. “The goal is to better meet the needs of individual and business users, although we know that the positive effects of the change will not be felt for some time,” says Vignoli.

“Educate companies about FOSS [Free Open Source Software o software libre y de código abierto] it is not a trivial task and we have just started our journey in this direction,” he adds. The difference is important because anyone, casual user, professional or company, can access any version of LibreOffice, but additional support and technical assistance services can only be arranged through the enterprise version.

The latest version of the office suite so far, although it has already received the first maintenance update, is LibreOffice 7.4. Although it’s not available if it’s the one available in the macOS App Store, or if it’s a previous one with extended support, because it doesn’t specify.