I've been using LibreOffice and before that OpenOffice for as long as it's been open source. Writer, Impress and Calc are fantastic products and as capable as anything else on the market. That said, I fear the market for non-web based office software is going to slowly shrink.
The real competition is web based office suites like Google Docs, Zoho and Microsoft Office. The web based suites are missing lots of features, but they make up for it two ways: auto revisions/save and real-time collaboration. It's hard to go back to old-style local single-access files once you've had a team of four working on a document at the same time.
Finally, most of us have been frog-potted one too many times by software that switches to a community / paid enterprise license model. The name "community edition" tends to signal a bleak future. I've had to switch from SugarCRM, ElasticSearch and a few others because in the rush to create value in the "enterprise" version, eventually they just make the community one suck instead of making the enterprise one that much better. Also, the truth is I wouldn't have even bothered using Sugar or Elastic if the only option was to pay for it.
The real competition is web based office suites like Google Docs, Zoho and Microsoft Office. The web based suites are missing lots of features, but they make up for it two ways: auto revisions/save and real-time collaboration. It's hard to go back to old-style local single-access files once you've had a team of four working on a document at the same time.
Finally, most of us have been frog-potted one too many times by software that switches to a community / paid enterprise license model. The name "community edition" tends to signal a bleak future. I've had to switch from SugarCRM, ElasticSearch and a few others because in the rush to create value in the "enterprise" version, eventually they just make the community one suck instead of making the enterprise one that much better. Also, the truth is I wouldn't have even bothered using Sugar or Elastic if the only option was to pay for it.