> On 20 Apr 2015, at 13:06, Guy Waterval <waterval....@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Or have you not noticed that there are
>> precious few native (as opposed to virtualised) open-source productivity
>> tools to be found ready for the enterprise?

to rephrase: productivity software, especially for enterprise, is 
overwhelmingly dominated by proprietary apps sold by very large multinational 
corporations. The apps available are often "free," as in beer but not free as 
in speech. They are not open source. It does not matter if the operating system 
is Android or iOS or whatever, though there are some differences, at least in 
the marginal OSs, which represent a minute fraction of the total used.

What this means is that as tablets (however imagined) are brought into the 
enterprise (public or private sector), open source is almost entirely absent. 
Yes, many apps use open source languages but so what? The UX model promoted by 
the smart, mobile device shuts out user intervention, with some exception, and 
there seems to be nothing organised that I can see that’s trying to change this 
arrangement and make it easier to create, distribute and even promote open 
source productivity apps on mobile devices.

Yes, I am aware that tablets are falling out of popularity, but I also am aware 
that the tablet as imagined by Apple and incarnated in the iPad, was designed 
and is still envisioned as a consumer entertainment device, not as a work 
device (though that is changing) and that efforts to insinuate the tablet form 
factor into enterprise, as Microsoft has tried, have not succeeded. However, 
the mobile device is succeeding in areas where investment capital is less 
visible and it is likely to be the preferred mode for the billions that will be 
coming fresh to school, work, and other areas where computing devices are de 
rigeur (now or soon). And these users, in Africa, Latin America, and  the rest 
of the world, rich or poor, will be using… proprietary software.

So, although the situation on the desktop (and by this one means also the 
laptop, of course; one refers here to the UX not hardware) is generally not bad 
for open source, that’s not so for the mobile UX. I doubt very much that Ubuntu 
or Moz. will put a dent into hard proprietary wave. What would, however, would 
be mobile apps that can work smoothly with existing desktop productivity 
software installations. Like Corinthia.

best
louis

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