https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=94126
--- Comment #5 from johann <[email protected]> --- re: comment #3 comment #3 addresses non-profits getting a "free ride". in the U.S., we do not have an omnipresent national government that tackles social ills with a horde of governmental workers and programs affecting every level of society. this work is "farmed out", mostly, to quite small non-profits directly connected with the local community they serve. it might be somewhat understandable to say that the organizations should be made to pay to get LO working, but that is not what the document foundation intends. it is, perhaps, not expected that all developers are fully tuned into the objectives set out for LO. please see this link from which the quotes, infra, were extracted (the first item of the "mission statement"): http://www.documentfoundation.org/foundation/ "Manifesto "Our values "We commit ourselves: "to eliminate the digital divide in society by giving everyone access to office productivity tools free of charge to enable them to participate as full citizens in the 21st century "We reject: "the ownership of office productivity tools by monopoly suppliers which imposes a de-facto tax on global electronic free speech and penalises the economically disadvantaged" the issues of this bug are core as it relates to supplanting MSoffice which is what these some 1,000 lowly-paid users currently use. is a small non-profit going to go out and hire experts to make LO usable for themselves? NOPE! if you were talking about some obscure italian local government, yes i would expect them to have to invest time and money to circumvent the 7,000 LO problems. for further edification of developers and readers, please note the following. it is **NOT** the policy of LO that every end-user firm -- irrespective of the redeeming nature of their contributions to society without profit motives -- must somehow individually find the money and expertise to contribute to fixing LO. clearly, such a policy is socially untenable. the proper LO policy would be to happily contribute to the greater good by acknowledging that these non-profits cannot make the same resource contributions that commercial and governmental operations can and should make. according to LO's 'Manifesto', that is exactly what LO intends. these non-profits operate on grants/contracts that are re-imbursable by expenditure. can you imagine that they are going to submit a proposal to the U.S. government that says '$3,000 to fix LibreOffice so we can use it". moreover, do you see the U.S. government saying "sure, that sounds good"? if you do see this happening can you live with the Federal retort: "we will just take that off the line item 'hot meals for economically and physically disabled shut-ins'"? additionally, how would LO ever hope to make inroads into the seven-figures worth of contractors and grantees that have mandated Federal interchange requirements based on MSoffice if LO cannot compete in that arena? what about all the state, regional, county, and city governments? i realize competing with MS is a big and probably thankless task. however, the work has to be done to make LO a premier product. it just cannot be done on the backs of those that cannot afford to contribute as has been wisely acknowledged in LO's official policy statement, supra. i can understand a developer not familiar with LO's policies feeling that anybody getting a "free ride" is not right and demeans their work product. the contrary is true. a developer's work is even more valuable by virtue of its contribution to the betterment of the social fabric offered via the small non-profit setting that diverts dollars from payments to soft-ware behemoths to their sole goal of supporting the disadvantaged in society. mind you, i understand the 'open-source' approach and applaud stances such as the EU has taken to avert soft-ware hegemony and anti-competivity of the sort which MS used to sink navigator with ie and as google chrome has done to opera and will do to firefox in order to save the billions of $US they used to pay for search connections. -- You are receiving this mail because: You are the assignee for the bug.
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