Is this the GNU/Linux vs. Linux useless argument thread, or the vi vs.
emacs useless argument thread? I got lost about a dozen posts (~100
paragraphs) back...
:P
- James Mason 'bear454'
On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 7:00 PM, Graham Lauder
On Friday 29 Oct 2010 12:20:56 you wrote:
H i Nelson
Graham,
We shared different opinions in the past, but I think we speak the same language in this case.
If we agreed all the time it would be a boring world indeed. :) Varying opinions are a given in OSS projects, I suspect that we simply have different backgrounds in Marketing and that tends to colour our views. When I first got into marketing there was no such thing as MBAs and the like and one learnt the craft at the coalface. I founded my first company in 1975 and was thrown in at the deep end as it were and frankly it wasn't until the third one that I started to get it right.:)
I've noticed a "OpenOffice.org Migration and training Consultant." on your signature, so eventually I assume that you know that for most people openoffice isn't really about code or project management, but about other issue, the tool provided
Indeed, it's a concept I often have to drum into client Project Managers, it's not about software it's about people, people just want to do their job
I wrote it probably in a very raw and superficial way. I don't knwo the structure of the openoffice community neither their inner problems. I honestly don't care, but I do care about the success of a free office suit that can provide good contents.
It's a huge community, all the others, including the distributions, are dwarfed by comparison.
There are 32,000 people subscribing to the mail lists at last count, around 1000 signatories to the JCA (joint copyright assignment that gives you access to the CVS. Corporate Contributors sometimes have one each, so the Novell guys may have 50 devs working on it [it should be noted that some are philosophically opposed to the JCA and so their contributions just go to go- ooo], consequently the actual number is bigger although volatile, depending on the policies of the particular corporate)
Over a hundred Native language projects, each with it's own QA, Marketing and L10n teams. The level two projects also have their own web team. There are already multiple versions (Lotus Symphony, Oxygen Office, RedOffice, Go- oo.org, EuroOffice, OOo4kids and now LibO.) So this is not a new thing. The new thing is The Document Foundation and the fact that it is driven by people at the top of the OOo community tree. Having said all this, most considered that Oracle would join and so everything would stay the same except for ownership of the copyright. Hasn't work out that way yet, we are still communicating, maybe in the future.
OpenOffice did it, at least for Portuguese the Dictionary and Thesaurus (which were community contributions) were far superior than any comercial product I know out there. This part of the community, probably agnostic to code, is loosing with such fork. That's the concerning part, alongside with an image that took a long time to build.
True, fortunately the people that have crossed to LibO are well aware. The Broffice team from Brazil who are the major contributors to the Portugese translations have joined with libO and the Lead of the NLC (Native Language Confederation), Charles Schultz is one of the founders/ Steering Committee as is Florian Effenberger, ex OOo Marketing project lead and so on. The reason there was such an uproar was because these guys and others of the TDF founders were members of OOo's management body, the Community Council.
However there are still a lot of us that support both, we don't see competition right now, that may change in the future. I still retain my appointment as Marketing Contact for New Zealand, OOo is still my primary focus but I will recommend other versions to clients if they are a better fit to the environment they are going to.
I'm sure Libre and Open Office have already a batallion of people far smarter than I do to sort this things out. I hope so. Trully do.
Feel free to come on board, it's fascinating right now, branding and marketing from the ground up. What we do now will affect the project for years to come.
How's your time Graham? You are native english speaker, which is nice, and since your field is marketing as well, would be interested in working a marketing article along with me on the subject and submit it to the "Journal of Marketing"? It's a long shot to get it approved, but we could try :)
Most definitely, I have often thought of doing something and I'm at a bit of a loose end right now since I broke my hand, just that I'm forced to type really slowly
Cheers GL
nelson
On Fri, 2010-10-29 at 01:46 +1300, Graham Lauder wrote:
Firstly I saw no real criticism, I thought Nelson's blog summed up the situation from Marketing perspective quite well, everything he poisnted out we are quite aware of.
-- Graham Lauder, OpenOffice.org MarCon (Marketing Contact) NZ http://marketing.openoffice.org/contacts.html
OpenOffice.org Migration and training Consultant.
INGOTs Assessor Trainer (International Grades in Open Technologies) www.theingots.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help@opensuse.org
-- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help@opensuse.org