14 DAY TRIAL // NeoOffice.org’s pluby, also known as The Architect on the Trinity forums, has written a lengthy post explaining that he and his fellow colleagues (Fran, Patrick and Ed) have been encountering financial difficulties lately. As a result, they must now cut back on the services they used to provide free of charge to NeoOffice fans.
“I have bad news to report,” pluby begins his post. “Due to very low donation levels this year, we must make severe cutbacks in the services that we provide users. In the past few years, users donated enough each month for us to provide the following:
- Rapid, thorough responses to any user support questions even if they have never donated to NeoOffice; - Rapid fixes for any crashing bugs that users find even if it the bug is caused by OpenOffice.org or Go-oo code; - Free downloads for hundreds of thousands of users each month.”
The Architect further stresses that, “Although we have always operated on a very tiny budget, these three services do require money. The first two services require full time staffing so money is needed to pay Fran and I a small salary and health care. The last service also requires money to pay for servers and the huge amount of bandwidth that our users use.”
According to the developer, few users donate anymore and, so, the team cannot work and fund large bandwidth bills without any donations. As a result of this, “We must significantly reduce our costs to match the steep decline in donations from our users,” pluby writes.
The team behind the popular office suite for Mac OS X promises to continue to answer NeoOffice and NeoOffice Mobile questions, but only to their large donors, who are now paying more than 50% of their total costs, the post reveals.
“Of course, if donations rise in the future, we can look at reversing the cutbacks,” pluby adds. “However, with the current economic situation in most countries, we do not expect donations to rise this year.”
Last week, NeoOffice.org released new updates to its full-featured suite of office applications for Mac OS X. The patches (five for Neo 3.0 and 13 for version 2.2.5) fix an issue that was just found after Patch 4 for NeoOffice 3.0 was released. Fans can download the latest version of the software using the link below.