Comment by mschuster91
5 days ago
Money is one thing, it's desperately needed.
The key question is, who will call the shots? That's the most pressing problem with many open-source projects without commercial backers - they completely lack focus, unless there is either some sort of BDFL providing the guardrails (be it Linus Torvalds, Guido van Rossum, Daniel Stenberg, Fabrice Bellard or the other usual suspects), or someone backed by serious financial firepower uses said influence (i.e. Lennart Poettering of systemd).
Particularly something like an office / productivity suite is ripe for conflicts. One group of users (i.e. stingy governments) want something that can run on computers that would be more fitting in a museum. Other groups want pixel-perfect compatibility with Microsoft products, even if it results in a ton of extra work. Others don't want LDAP support for the email client's address book, but instead other stuff like an integration into Okta or whatever other SaaS. And either someone will get empowered to make such decisions by everyone involved... or it will be a lot of money wasted or a lot of chaos.
Not saying that more governance and focus wouldn't bring more bang for buck, but from the lists I sent, you would notice a pattern of investing on open standards and vendor-agnostic infrastructure. It makes servicing specific needs overall easier, because the whole field is elevated through easier interop and efficiency. If LDAP, email, GUI apps and videoconferencing become easier, making an "LDAP-enabled GUI email client that does group calls" that's perfect your (industry/trade/…) needs goes from "near impossible, requires millions in CAPEX" to "we'll have it in a matter of days/weeks".
The other nice thing is, the whole world benefits from it, for free. The only losers are the monopolists and other societal parasites.