Hi Don,
Hope you had a relaxing xmas break!
Am 23.12.11 02:44, schrieb Donald Harbison:
This seems like a much more constructive thread.
FWIW, I know the guys at Team OO, well, at least since I first met them in
2005 at OpenOffice.org Conference in Koper, Slovenia. There is passion and
continuity here that I think Pavel speaks very eloquently about. And it's
worth respecting and supporting, in my view.
Thanks! I can only echo this.
This is especially true, if
they are sincere in stating they will move to exert their efforts as
volunteers in the future of Apache OpenOffice, once they are finished with
this maintenance release (3.3.1)...
We would love to start joining the work on future version but we need to
fix our other problem first, which is funding.
Sure, there have been blunders, but we here in AOO have not been so great
with clear communications, so let's face the future, so to speak, together.
To that end, why not offer the TeamOO guys a share of the brand, something
like 'White Label Office 3.3.1, Powered by OpenOffice.org, now at Apache
Software Foundation'?
Or, 'White Label Office 3.3.1, Powered by Apache OpenOffice, the new home
of OpenOffice.org'
Great! That's certainly something we are interested in. I would like to
see some more details about such a "Powered by"-program.
So long as their fund raising efforts cease to mis-lead consumers, stating
clearly that OpenOffice.org is now under the stewardship of the ASF, we're
good.
Looks like we need to clean-up our messaging even more. Hope you've seen
the flying box on our website with "Home of the Development Project".
The problem is to find the balance between a description of our former
and planned role and a confusing association to the project. One
example: If we state, we helped to invent OOo, this is an important
message to our potential customers about our expertise. At the same time
this message ignores the fact that other inventors are working for IBM,
Novell or RedHat now. My opinion? They have sponsors and can speak for
themselves.
Our goal is to convince OpenOffice.org users to upgrade to Apache
OpenOffice 3.4 and buy support from us. And we will not get paid to just
promote Apache. So let's sort out who needs to communicate what.
Yes?
Yes!
Thanks,
Goetz
Stefan, Martin and Goetz, please respond first. What do you think?
Best regards,
/don harbison
On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 10:54 AM, Donald Whytock<[email protected]> wrote:
On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 11:31 PM, Dennis E. Hamilton
<[email protected]> wrote:
2. I then wondered if "white label" had some other, independent
significance. Indeed it does:<
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-label_product>. And here too:<
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/white_label>. Oddly, the English phrase is
apparently used in German as well. I don't think the association with
bootleg music is intended though. I will have to install the
German-language version of the release just to see how the identifier is
used within the TOOo release.
Actually, by that definition, everything under the ASF is "white
label", as it's explicitly legal to rebrand it. That makes "White
Label Office" genuinely ironic.
Don
