[toweringgoat]

>> For that to be viable it would have to add a real benefit that people would be willing to pay for.

does not necessarily mean:

>> [I have little hope for a] commercial desktop office that is not Microsoft.

Companies (and consumers) might have no reason to pay for the actual software itself, but they will pay for:

- Support: where support is things like fixing bugs that are encountered, producing custom builds with cherry-picked bug fixes, etc. Also, more traditional support around getting it configured in your enterprise and/or migrating your enterprise to new software.

- Feature development: so that the software does what they actually need. (Some places might do this in-house, but usually you'd just contract out to one of the companies that has developers with expertise in the codebase.)

It's a mistake to think that money can only be made by selling a product. In the open source world you generally sell services (which is tough, but there are a few companies in this space).