Comment by ahartmetz
4 days ago
License fees for a few thousand workplaces of Microsoft can pay for a lot of development on FOSS alternatives instead. There is very little overhead there.
Some things take a lot of work, but many changes that would be useful are pretty easy to make. Crash and bug and (some) performance fixes, time-saving automations and integrations with rough and / or minimal user interfaces and so on.
What's more, you can pay for local dev! I imagine not sending money to the US and keeping it local is not a small consideration.
That's true but I don't see them taking the "money saved" and sending it to openOffice for software improvement.