Open source office software LibreOffice now requires a one-time payment for its suite in the Mac App Store.

The app costs €8.99 once. That is one of the first times that The Document Foundation, the organization behind the open source software, charges money for the suite. In a blog post, Italo Vignoli, the spokesperson for LibreOffice, explains that this is a new strategy for the company.

In the future, there will always be a free ‘Community version’ made by volunteers. However, the various ‘ecosystem companies’, as Vignoli calls them, are getting a paid version, because professionals have adapted this software to work seamlessly within the system, in this case, Apple’s. Although it may also play a role, it simply costs organizations money to host apps on the various App Stores.

The LibreOffice client in the Mac App Store is not based on the same source code as the standard version of LibreOffice, explains Vignoli. Until now, the software was always maintained by the consultancy company Collabora. In the future, it should therefore become clearer which software is ‘open’ and which versions are commercial and therefore adapted by companies.

By the way, if you want a free Community version of LibreOffice for macOS, you can always find it on the LibreOffice website itself. Vignoli itself implies that the main difference with the paid version on the Mac App Store is that the latter does not support Java.