LGPL/MPL (copyleft) are superior to AL (permissive) when applied to desktop software such as office suites because they are definitely able to attract more volunteer developers and probably more companies, and a larger hackers community is able to develop more features and solve a higher number of regressions and bugs.
History tells that the only company attracted by permissive licenses when applied to office suites is IBM, although IBM - in the case of AOO - is not investing a large enough amount of money to sustain the growth of the software, given that the permissive license is not attracting volunteer developers (with a few exceptions). By the way, I personally do not like permissive licenses, and find the term "permissive" a clear marketing spin. When asked about permissive licenses, I prefer to use the term "predatory", because they allow corporations to predate the work of volunteers. But this is just a personal opinion, and I am not a developer but just an old marketer. On 1/1/13 4:15 PM, Immanuel Giulea wrote: > When I switched from OOo to LO, I didn't notice any big differences. Actually, AOO is probably 18 months behind LibreOffice in term of development, and is also missing most of the development back office, such as tinderboxes, automated tests, source code bibisect and gerrit, which has been created from scratch by LibreOffice developers (as it did not exist back at OOo). > If not for the differences in licences, why should end-users choose LO over > AOO when migrating away from MSO? How is LO a "better product"? More features, larger development community, independence from a single corporate sponsor, larger number of languages available for interface, wider corporate support (SUSE, RedHat, Google and Intel, plus other companies paying developers such as Canonical). > In marketing, this is essential. Competitive advantage. AOO is the original > project. LO the fork. Technically speaking, AOO is a fork as much as LibreOffice, as the license has been changed and some portions of the code - because they were GPL/LGPL - have been replaced. AOO has the advantage of the brand name, because Oracle allows AOO to leverage the old OOo brand equity, but the brand is diluting over time. > LO will release version 4 in midfeb. AOO will release in April. MSO 2013 > sometime in the next three months will be available to consumers. The release date of AOO 4.0 has not been set, at least from what you can read on the AOO mailing lists. In addition, there has been a drop of deveopment activity after graduation, as you can easily spot from Ohloh: http://www.ohloh.net/p/openoffice/contributors/summary (set the timeframe to 1 year to have a better feeling of the drop). Of course, there might be some "hidden" development activity at IBM, although it is rather strange that nothing has happened on the web and the wiki (because AOO, to inflate numbers, has added web and wiki code to repositories monitored by Ohloh, which is reflected under Languages by the 21% of HTML code and the 10% of XML code). Microsoft is a different story, because they will put a very large amount of money behind the new version of MS Office. In my experience, the most effective marketing strategy against MS is reactive, because you can leverage MS efforts. > Marketing strategies need to be targeted: > For large organisations. For small business. For government. For consumers. We should always rememebr that we cannot compete with Microsoft using traditional marketing strategies, because the money they can put on the table is changing the game. We can play guerrilla marketing strategies, which might be quite effective, and guerrilla marketing strategies are less structured and targeted (by definition). I would avoid falling into the "feature trap" created by Microsoft, because the reality is that 80% of the features of office suites are the same, and 20% are different because the developers are different (although they try to answer the same customer needs). Of course, having a feature comparison might be useful, but I would not use it as a selling point against any product. Free software has other selling points which are specific and unique, although they are more difficult to explain to the majority of the users. We cannot avoid to invest a large amount of our efforts in educating users to understand free software. > LO already dominates Linux and this is great. So let's consider Windows and > Mac OS. Windows is definitely the main target, because the concentration around MS Office is higher. On the Mac there are several office suites: Apple iWorks, MS Office, LibreOffice, AOO and NeoOffice. In addition, many Mac users are not using office suites because of their job. -- Italo Vignoli - [email protected] mob +39.348.5653829 - VoIP [email protected] skype italovignoli - gtalk [email protected] -- 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
