Hi :) I guess it depends what you mean by "pay" and "free". A vast amount of people get sucked into the Free Software World and then start helping people or programming or putting their valuable time into the projects in other ways that benefit the project.
The pay-off is that they tend to reduce their outgoings so there is less need for them to spend money on things they would normally have to spend a lot of money on. The Free Software Foundation are very clear in their GPLs and such how people can legitimately earn money through Free Software. The ones i noticed were through providing technical support and selling the software on media such as Cds/Dvds/Usb-sticks. For the devs i guess that means tier3 support? A lot of devs are paid by the company they work for to work on FOSS projects. The pay-off for the companies are things like NOT paying a rival competitor vast sums of money for license fees. Also being able to target specific issues to suit the company rather than waiting for a rival company to get around to it (whatever "it" happens to be that month). Helping produce something that undercuts their rivals products is an off-shoot. Copenhagen hospitals are apparently set to save millions by moving to LibreOffice. If they spent a fraction of that saving on developers time then they could end up with something practically purpose-built for their precise needs. A small boost to the local economy rather than having that money disappear off to a foreign country. Regards from Tom :) --- On Thu, 26/4/12, Robert Ryley <[email protected]> wrote: From: Robert Ryley <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [libreoffice-marketing] Article on Datamation website: "How Microsoft Office Tops LibreOffice: 11 Features" To: [email protected] Date: Thursday, 26 April, 2012, 16:04 Interesting article. With regard to the bibliography tool -- what is he talking about? The professional writers I deal with all use something like Endnotes. The bibliography issue isn't all that hard to fix. All of those things mentioned are arguably outside the scope of office productivity software, and responsible for the bloat people complain about. They could be available as *paid* extensions for those who need them. I'm switching topic here a bit, but this needs to be discussed. From a marketing POV, I'm a bit concerned that this concept of "free" software is having the opposite effect of conditioning people into not having to pay for things. I like free things too, but the developers have to eat. I can't see a scenario where a developer will make more revenue via donations than via a straight up trade of cash for functionality, so it seems to me that some functionality must be released *after* payment is made. Likewise, software with source code is more valuable than software without it. But unless there are opportunities for add on services, simply releasing the source code reduces the profit potential for developers. I'm sure there is a happy medium somewhere. Free and Open Source software will explode when people actually value freedom enough to *pay* for it. The true LO selling point should be unlimitted ability to customize to individual and industry. The free portion of the LO codebase should focus on the most essential and frequently used features, while experts develop and sell extensions for particular user groups. Of course, the free application should be usable by the vast majority of people, as it is now. For example, I'm a member of the American Medical Writers' Association. I've helped someone use LO yesterday to edit a PDF. Specialized extensions for this would include a medical/bioinformatics dictionary or style sheets for formatting for professional journals. This is something that people are willing to pay for. But simply releasing it freely is not a viable option from a business POV, unless enough money is raised to make such an act attractive from a profit perspective. This makes LO unattractive to many in this field, as they don't see how to get support. They don't understand how to function in an open source world, and it will require time, money, and effort to teach them. > I suggested that he say things like "MS Office is sexily vulnerable to > malware and stable enough that it doesn't fix such issues > too fast.". > Regards from > Tom :) -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to [email protected] Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/marketing/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to [email protected] Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/marketing/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
