On Thu, Jul 09, 2020 at 02:28:51PM +0100, Michael Meeks wrote: > Because it is free software lots of things are possible is > true - that because they are possible they are therefore good, is > not necessarily so.
> Many things are legal, but many fewer are moral. > Steering people towards things that help to build the > community and codebase is extremely useful. In the same way many > people think that steering people towards environmentally friendly > alternatives might help improve the environment despite there being > no legal requirement. The wording being now considered clearly tries to steer all business use, big and small, towards a paid-for "ecosystem supported" version. For that steering to actually work, it requires that the "ecosystem companies" actually scale down and have a working business proposition for SME business use. That is a challenge on the plate of these companies, but that is critical for the success of this community plan. > it is also an industry standard for successful ecosystems: > Fedora vs. RedHat Enterprise Linux vs. CentOS. > or > SUSE vs openSUSE Redhat will sell you a yearly subscription for a single workstation, as low as 180 USD. So will SuSE for 32 GBP. Will any ecosystem company scale down? That takes a fully automated setup, where people self-register and pay on your website. Closer to home, Microsoft will sell you a single licence for their office suite, either as "perpetual" or "subscription" starting at 5 USD/month or 8.25 USD/month, no upfront payment, pay each month. I wouldn't call the process entirely pain-free, but from their point of view, it doesn't require human intervention for every sale, for every invoice, for every payment. The above are "self-support" options without support by a human. They also benefit from far bigger economies of sale than the LibreOffice ecosystem developer companies. So, if ecosystem companies want to attract the same "every business user pays" model, they need to make that actually workable, easy and as painless as possible. Currently, my feeling is that it is deadlocked into a chicken and egg type problem; the ecosystem companies are the chicken, and they need to invest effort (and capital) lay the first eggs. They cannot wait for the economies of scale to drop into their lap and make it worthwhile to setup the human-free "pay us" system. They need to put the system in place, and only then can the number of small scale paying users actually grow. If the developer ecosystem companies are not willing to put their money where their mouth is (and "lay the first eggs" for the SME market), the whole presentation needs to be refocused so that it is clear that only "enterprise" deployments of "many" (for some value of "many") users are invited/encouraged/under moral obligation to pay. I've seen some recent progress in the right direction, but I don't think we are there yet. CIB probably is closer, with all the irony of being directed to the Microsoft store when trying to buy a single licence, from a GNU/Linux browser (which may suggest the use of for GNU/Linux). -- Lionel -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: board-discuss+unsubscr...@documentfoundation.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy
