Jiajun Xu writes:
The annual community event LibreOffice Asia Conference was held on December 13-14 2025 in Tokyo, Japan. One of the sessions was a panel discussion titled “Lessons from Open Source Business,” moderated by Franklin Weng, featuring three company leaders from different countries sharing how they run their businesses with open source tools. This article covers the first part of the panel: the business introductions.
(Note: photo credits: Tetsuji Koyama, CC BY 4.0)
Business Introductions
Germany: Lothar Becker and .riess applications
The first to present was Lothar Becker from Germany, Managing Director and owner of “.riess applications.” The company primarily operates in Europe, providing consulting services based on open source solutions.
Lothar described himself as not being development-oriented, but rather focused on client relationships and consulting — a personal trait that has shaped the company’s direction. As a consulting firm, a defining feature of .riess’s business model is that it does not charge for technical support or long-term support licensing fees. Instead, they productize their expertise as consulting services. This means .riess operates on a people- and time-based revenue model, which does not lend itself to the kind of exponential revenue scaling that SaaS companies achieve through near-zero marginal costs.
Regarding market positioning, Lothar noted that .riess has extensive experience in desktop-oriented open source solutions. “This was the direction we set 20 years ago. At the time, every company in Europe was focused on the server side and the operating system side, while very few were working on the desktop. By not following the crowd, we carved our own path. It wasn’t easy, but it turned out to be the right decision,” Lothar said.
.riess has served many notable clients, including internationally renowned companies such as JP Morgan Chase and the Deutsche Bundesbank. They have also been involved in large-scale government migration projects, including those in Schleswig-Holstein and the Free State of Thuringia (Freistaat Thüringen). In the Schleswig-Holstein case, 25,000 client endpoints were migrated from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice. The project established a resilient support structure: the government’s existing IT service provider, Dataport, handled first- and second-level support, while .riess provided third-level support focusing on strategic consulting, macro migration, and interoperability issues.
Development and bug fixing were handled by another open source partner, Allotropia. This collaborative model demonstrates how small open source service companies can participate in large government migration projects by partnering with others, each contributing their specific expertise. Beyond major clients, .riess has also helped many smaller clients adopt online collaborative office suites and other open source solutions.
Taiwan: Kevin Lin and OSSII
The next speaker was Kevin Lin from OSSII (Open Source Software Integral Institute) in Taiwan. Founded in 2003, OSSII’s core business includes LibreOffice-related product development and system integration, Nextcloud customization and deployment, and open source solution consulting services. Kevin noted that his core role is to serve as a bridge between the government, enterprises, and the open source community, while helping clients stay grounded and avoid unrealistic expectations: open source is powerful, but making effective use of it still requires proper planning and professional support.
OSSII is focused on localized office productivity solutions built on open source software. On the desktop side, “OxOffice” is a LibreOffice-based office suite customized with various features tailored to the needs of Taiwanese enterprises and government agencies.
For online collaboration, “OxOffice Online” is an online editor derived from Collabora Online. Together with “ODFWeb”, an online collaboration platform customized from Nextcloud that provides full-text search, data sharing, and file permission management, these components form a complete open source document collaboration ecosystem. Kevin also demonstrated real-world customer deployments, proving that the solution works reliably in large-scale environments.
It’s worth noting that OSSII has maintained a close partnership with the Taiwanese government for over a decade. After the government established policies to promote the Open Document Format (ODF) standard, the open source community helped with advocacy while OSSII provided technical solutions centered on LibreOffice, contributing as much source code as possible back to the community. Kevin showed the Ministry of Digital Affairs’ “ODF Application Tools” page, with its source code publicly shared on GitHub — a prime example of collaboration between government, enterprise, and the open source community.
Finally, Kevin reiterated his company’s role as a bridge: OSSII connects communities and open source projects on one side with enterprises, government, and end users on the other, facilitating exchange and interaction through operations, development, integration, and training. OSSII’s vision is to open up Taiwan’s traditionally closed software ecosystem, reduce dependence on major vendors, and support digital sovereignty while maintaining a healthy business environment.
Indonesia: Ahmad Haris and STIA & Nenggala
The third speaker was Ahmad Haris from Indonesia, who serves as Vice President at STIA and founder of Nenggala. Rather than talking about a vision and mission statements, he preferred to let his case studies speak for themselves.
Haris joked that government officials sometimes refer to him as a “technology magician” because they always come to him with all sorts of challenges—often with deadlines of just three to four weeks. The largest government project he handled at STIA was building a biometric-based criminal record database for the Indonesian Attorney General’s Office, capable of connecting to cameras and surveillance systems, enabling real-time facial recognition matching against criminal records. This system is expected to be deployed to every city in Indonesia within the next few years.
What stands out is that Haris has never successfully “sold” LibreOffice as a standalone offering. Instead, his approach is to embed LibreOffice within backend systems to handle document generation – so users don’t even know they’re using LibreOffice. He even plans to try getting clients to use Linux on the desktop next: not by pushing it, but by building it first, showing that it works well, and then saying, “It’s up to you whether you want to use it.”
Nenggala has only three full-time employees including Haris himself, yet they have built an impressive array of tools: a secure communication system based on the Matrix protocol, used by the election commission during the last presidential election and serving over 300,000 users; task management based on Planka; and SymbiotOS, a hardened mobile device solution based on GrapheneOS with high privacy and security standards — even capable of running Debian on a phone via KVM.
However, not every project is profitable. During the COVID-19 pandemic, they built a remote learning solution using BigBlueButton and Moodle, but rural elementary schools simply couldn’t afford to pay. Haris just couldn’t bring himself to charge them, and in some cases even donated servers.
Haris also shared an important practice: when his team uses open source projects, they don’t simply fork and rebrand—they actively contribute back upstream. For example, when they adopted the support management system Zammad, they discovered that an Indonesian language translation was missing. His teammate Rania Amina completed the full localization and pushed it upstream. Rania has since become the Indonesian language maintainer for the project.
Moderator’s Summary
After the three business introductions, Franklin provided a comparative summary of the three speakers’ business styles:
- Kevin’s OSSII started in the OpenOffice.org era and has remained focused on LibreOffice and Nextcloud. They have their own products, development capabilities, and do customization—a well-rounded, all-in-one type.
- Lothar’s .riess applications traces its origins back even further, having been the first commercial service partner for StarOffice and later OpenOffice.org. Today, they have chosen to focus purely on services: no products, no licensing fees, no development — a highly focused consulting model.
- Haris leverages open source technologies across different business models. His two companies differ in approach: STIA is project-oriented, while Nenggala is more product-oriented. Both do development and customization, but with different emphases.
Despite their different paths, Franklin pointed out several clear commonalities. First, all three started by participating in open source communities and gradually developed their skills in development, community leadership, or business operations along the way. Second, scaling remains a challenge for these companies; none of them has more than ten employees. Being small companies, they always need to collaborate with other partners, operating in a “fight as a group” mode. Finally, all three have extensive experience working with government clients, helping public sector organizations migrate to and adopt open source solutions.
