On Tue, 2005-08-30 at 08:38 -0400, swhiser wrote: > The great amount of attention on OOoCon, RegiCon and WhatHaveYouCon > would be better spent generating networks and coordinating > communications outside The Little OOo Black Box to mainstream > publications, schools and universities who do not know OOo exists.
We need both. One is not exclusively better than the other. Its true that we have a limit on resources but some things don't take too much effort for a relatively good pay back - I'd say NEA falls into that category because it got OOo to hundreds of people who did not know it existed. DLS and OOoConf are a bit different but still important. It is important to have a main conference. Face to face meetings are important - that is why there needs to be opportunities for this outside Europe. The USA is a big place so there is even a case for get togethers in different places. If these can double up with getting OOo to new potential users, especially connectors with many other people as is the case with schools, its simply more efficient. > The idea of cultivating developers for OOo -- given that the licenses > are repellant to developers who are not corporations -- is like pouring > dust on a dried out plant with hopes of reviving it. I think that the strategies so far to get developers in have not been particularly successful. The reasons are difficult to be sure about. But it might be an idea to think of some new ones. > I fear this is what Sun/Microsoft want of OOo, to leave room for the > StarOffice brand, Star Office brand isn't going to me much good without OOo. Star Office is just another office suite. OOo is what makes it compelling as a standard. > but sadly this is a self-immolating strategy. It is > one reason why GPL'ing and restructuring the project through a > foundation may be the only way to make it effective again. Personally I would be in favour of GPL and a foundation but that depends on someone having sufficient resources to do it. At the moment that is just Sun. Unless someone else comes along with comparable resources to Sun or Sun decides its a good idea its not going to happen. > Look at the > release slippage; Since when did any software project not slip ;-) > look at the code bloat; look at the forks producing > redundant effort; look at Firefox pulling away. Code bloat is no worse than the main competitor but it is an area to consider improvement. Its one of the subjects for a presentation at OOoConf. Forks could be an issue and disenchantment is always going to make that more likely. However to be effective a fork is going to have to have corporate backing like with IBM. Firefox is doing well, good luck to them. > I hope describing these serious and fundamental problems, places this > thread in the StrangeLovian light it belongs. Problems are there to be solved. Some things you can do something about, some you can't. The key is in knowing which is which. -- Ian Lynch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ZMSL --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
