On Friday 29 October 2010 01:14:47 Nelson Marques wrote:
> On Thu, 2010-10-28 at 21:43 +0200, Jos Poortvliet wrote:
> > Please note that what I am trying to say is not that you guys made a
> > wrong
> > choice. It simply depends on what you think the Weekly news is for,
> > what the
> > goal is. And as you guys are making it, that is very much your
> > decision. If
> > you want to inform the community about what is going on, then
> > something like
> > Nelson's blog might belong in there. If you want to be a marketing
> > tool, then
> > it doesn't. As I don't think that choice has been made you have done
> > nothing
> > wrong ;-)
>
> Jos,
>
> Please read that paragraph, the times necessary to understand if there's
> a flaw there. Be careful at some point you imply that if they don't
> follow a certain direction, they are not doing marketing work. Careful
> with such statements.
>
> In a way you imply that if they take seriously peoples criticism and
> portrait some more 'sensible' stuff, they might not be marketing. That's
> not I see it. It might not be good to our audience.
>
> My post wasn't meant about bashing down, was meant about highlighting
> the complicated path that {Libre,Open}Office have ahead. As a community
> and knowing how much is in stake (a lot, that's why many people saw it
> as negative, because they are ignoring those points, and that's bad for
> them), we support Libre Office as a community.
>
> I think that people are so obcessed with 'legalese' and code, that
> sometimes they forget that in the case of products like openoffice and
> LibreOffice their success is not tied only to us, within a linux distro,
> than also with the everyday consumer. They for sudre will not see the
> things with the fundamentalism that we do.
>
> People also fail to neglect, that one of the greatest strengths of the
> free office suits, for example openoffice.org is the vast number of
> contributions in non-code areas, for example thesaurus and dictionaries.
> I apologize, you will end up by splitting also that part of the
> community... and I wonder how many of you, coders, have actually
> contributed for a dictionary contents or thesaurus... or that is not
> important? That's one of your greatests strengths, you and also will be
> splitting those contributions. Upstream doesn't really work a lot for
> this kinda stuff. You are neglecting a lot. Sorry, I tried to open your
> eyes.
>
> Satoru, Sasha: Thanks for caring. I share the same view, that
> contributors will does matter. Congratulations for an awesome job. I
> will remove my feeds, because I'm not willing to fight useless fights.
> Thanks for seeing something 'special' on my article and maybe for
> understanding it's contents, which clearly many people failed to. You
> have my gratitude and my respect. My english is bad, but there is
> anything I can assist you with, I can spare 2 hours a week for it.You assume I did not understand your point - but I do, really. Forking is, for the reasons you mention, a hugely risky business and many forks fail. However, sometimes there is no choice. A good historical example is Xfree86 -> X.org. The way Xfree86 was working was simply holding back the whole linux ecosystem. It still ain't perfect but much better than it was... I am very sure LibreOffice falls in the same categorie - the fork was long overdue because of the HUGE mismanagement on the OpenOffice side. Like with Xfree86, I expect most of the community to move over relatively smoothly and quickly and in a few years everyone will use LibreOffice. Forking is a neccesairy evil - which you rightly pointed out. As I said, in that regard your blog was perfectly valid. But on face value it seemed to put down the LibreOffice effort - if someone would not read the blog fully or not understand it, that would be the feeling they would get away with. From a 'internal discussion' point of view not a problem; from a marketing perspective quite horrible ;-) > Guys, please, lets end this :) > It's a cultural thing. > > Nelson
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