Re: [tdf-discuss] Re: Paid developers
On 15 May 2011 06:35, Jonathan Aquilina eagles051...@gmail.com wrote: On 15/05/2011 03:58, Marc Paré wrote: Hi Ian Le 2011-05-14 18:14, Ian Lynch a écrit : Totally agree with this. OOo had some severe problems in the early days simply because it was not easy to install across hundreds of machines on a network. All schools tend to be organised on networks so installations will be hundreds of a machines at a time which is good and a real incentive to make it easy to maintain. Not sure of the situation now. Could it be improved? I am on the dev list and I don't think that any devs have shown interest in this. Plus the fact that there are few devs who would have access to a network. We need to provided committed devs to network labs to test fully test out network installations and updates. I have 4 linux boxes and 2 windows boxes at home. I may turn my house into a server-run house this summer and test out network installation. Cheers Marc I can help as well I have one windows desktop another drive on same desktop with linux a linux server, another windows laptop linux netbook and to macbooks -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted Not sure about in USA/Canada but here in the UK nearly all schools will be on Active Directory Windows networks so that would be the thing to ensure was easy to manage. some will use Ghost or similar imaging tools for local discs so its important to ensure LO works well in these different scenarios. I haven't been involved with that side of things for some time so it might be every thing is fully worked out in that respect now. -- Ian Ofqual Accredited IT Qualifications The Schools ITQ www.theINGOTs.org +44 (0)1827 305940 You have received this email from the following company: The Learning Machine Limited, Reg Office, 36 Ashby Road, Tamworth, Staffordshire, B79 8AQ. Reg No: 05560797, Registered in England and Wales. -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
[tdf-discuss] Re: Paid developers
Hi Johnathan and Ian Thanks Johnathan for your offer of help. I believe this is the kind of help we would need. We could have a network of testers who could test the server implementation of LibreOffice and report back to the devs. I still think that we should also have a corporate LibreOffice lab where dedicated devs would pre-test suites. What better place to have it than official TDF/LibreOffice head office facilities? Le 2011-05-15 09:28, Ian Lynch a écrit : Not sure about in USA/Canada but here in the UK nearly all schools will be on Active Directory Windows networks so that would be the thing to ensure was easy to manage. some will use Ghost or similar imaging tools for local discs so its important to ensure LO works well in these different scenarios. I haven't been involved with that side of things for some time so it might be every thing is fully worked out in that respect now. Then I guess it would be a question of listing the possible networks and hoping to have enough individuals testing different network setups. Logically, the largest 2 would be of most importance, one of them being the Active Directory Windows network. Strategically speaking, we would want to include the network where we would hope to get the largest adoption of the suite in education, if this is the area we are most concerned with. Just for my information, is the Active Directory expensive to install? I would imagine that it is not free. In my region of Canada, Novell still dominates our educational server marketshare, although, Linux has become more and more a viable option. I have been off on sick leave for a year, but at my last meetings, moving to the Linux platform was taken seriously. Novell was/is pushing more its Linux solutions to school districts, which by default, would include LibreOffice the official office suite of choice. Cheers Marc -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [tdf-discuss] Re: Paid developers
On 15 May 2011 17:47, Marc Paré m...@marcpare.com wrote: Hi Johnathan and Ian Thanks Johnathan for your offer of help. I believe this is the kind of help we would need. We could have a network of testers who could test the server implementation of LibreOffice and report back to the devs. I still think that we should also have a corporate LibreOffice lab where dedicated devs would pre-test suites. What better place to have it than official TDF/LibreOffice head office facilities? Le 2011-05-15 09:28, Ian Lynch a écrit : Not sure about in USA/Canada but here in the UK nearly all schools will be on Active Directory Windows networks so that would be the thing to ensure was easy to manage. some will use Ghost or similar imaging tools for local discs so its important to ensure LO works well in these different scenarios. I haven't been involved with that side of things for some time so it might be every thing is fully worked out in that respect now. Then I guess it would be a question of listing the possible networks and hoping to have enough individuals testing different network setups. Logically, the largest 2 would be of most importance, one of them being the Active Directory Windows network. Strategically speaking, we would want to include the network where we would hope to get the largest adoption of the suite in education, if this is the area we are most concerned with. Just for my information, is the Active Directory expensive to install? I would imagine that it is not free. Active Directory is part of the Windows Server management software. It determines a whole range of settings such as permissions for accounts, who can access what software etc. It is complex and differently configured in different schools. In my region of Canada, Novell still dominates our educational server marketshare, although, Linux has become more and more a viable option. I have been off on sick leave for a year, but at my last meetings, moving to the Linux platform was taken seriously. Novell was/is pushing more its Linux solutions to school districts, which by default, would include LibreOffice the official office suite of choice. In the UK Novel and Linux servers for files are a tiny minority. Linux servers are used for proxies, web, firewalls etc but not much for file serving because of the complexity of Windows software used across schools and the technician knowledge base in Active Directory. Cheers Marc -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted -- Ian Ofqual Accredited IT Qualifications The Schools ITQ www.theINGOTs.org +44 (0)1827 305940 You have received this email from the following company: The Learning Machine Limited, Reg Office, 36 Ashby Road, Tamworth, Staffordshire, B79 8AQ. Reg No: 05560797, Registered in England and Wales. -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
[tdf-discuss] Re: Paid Developers
Hi Ian et al Le 2011-05-13 15:07, Ian Lynch a écrit : As a side note -- Dev's interested in the networking, connectivity of LibreOffice would also need access to a network lab of computers to expand/trouble-shoot network related issues. LibreOffice could maybe establish regional headquarters where it would fund labs where devs could physically work on networking issues. Research and development funds could be raised with this purpose in mind. All of this takes resources so its a bit of a Catch 22. Well, not really a Catch 22. We are the opensource company trying to market our software. So, as we have quite a large user base (at one point there was talk that 100 million users using OOo), we should be able to fundraise enough to fund such projects. I think it's all a matter of choices and strategy. The TDF/LibreOffice should devote part of its fundraising funds to establish corporate headquarters somewhere and use their offices or a network lab as testing facilities for networked LibreOffice install/use. We need to offer a solid product that is easily installed over a network of computers as well as assure that updates are done with the least amount of disturbances and ease. Incremental updates are best done rather than deleting/replacing the whole product. School districts/boards should be considered in the same way we would view large corporations. In most cases, school districts have to deal with hundreds of networked computers. Office suites are installed/updated remotely over the network. This is where LibreOffice, if interested in penetrating the educational/academic circles, needs to work on. Our devs would then need access to a lab of networked computers to test LibreOffice network-ability. Cheers Marc -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [tdf-discuss] Re: Paid Developers
On 05/13/2011 02:49 PM, Marc Paré wrote: Hi Ian Le 2011-05-13 05:27, Ian Lynch a écrit : Thanks for the info on the INGOTs. Having served on committees in charge of software acquisition, both at local and provincial level, I find the greatest reluctance on adopting is simply networking. While many of our school districts would like to move to LibreOffice, the vast majority rely on recommendations from their IT departments which are MS certified. In order to provide greater acceptance of our product we need to supply solid support from the point of view its network-ability. IT departments need to know that LibreOffice will work on their network and if there are problems that help is readily available. If there is no such service then the cost/seat is irrelevant -- MS Office is then kept. So, in my mind, we (the LibreOffice membership) should establish efficient national network help support. That is to say, for example, in my case, IT departments would have support help from LibreOffice.ca. There should also be for profit support available locally should IT departments prefer to acquire this support. We could easily promote both support models on a national scale if we were to have enough national developers attracted to our project alongside a certification programme. Perhaps to start off, we could offer free certification for dev's interested in the networking programming area of LibreOffice ... just to seed such a programme. As a side note -- Dev's interested in the networking, connectivity of LibreOffice would also need access to a network lab of computers to expand/trouble-shoot network related issues. LibreOffice could maybe establish regional headquarters where it would fund labs where devs could physically work on networking issues. Research and development funds could be raised with this purpose in mind. Cheers Marc If an msi is provided network installs can be done through microsofts group policy. -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
[tdf-discuss] Re: Paid developers
On 13 May 2011 21:50, e-letter inp...@gmail.com wrote: On 12 May 2011 17:55, Marc Par=E9 m...@marcpare.com wrote: Le 2011-05-11 17:01, Samuel M a =E9crit : I believe, that The Document Foundation can employ Developers for LibreOffice. I believe the community is able to get the money for that on a monthly base. We saw that the community was able to rise 50.000=80 in 8(!) days. It will be possible to get that money in a year for one full-time developer. These two examples show that this works even over a longer period of time (note that these projects are much smaller than LibreOffice): - Ardour (http://ardour.org): $4500 are raised every month to pay the main developer - Linux Mint (http://linuxmint.com): $5500 were raised in April to pay the main developer Despite from having full-time developers, for volunteer developers it would be nice to get money for fixing a specific bug / implementing a feature. Ardour has such a system where you can donate for a specific issue: http://ardour.org/bugbounty I think something like this would bring great benefit to LO, since users can show what they want to be fixed most and developers get some money for coding (or at their option donate it to TDF). To be honest, if we could convince most school districts in any count= ry to adopt the use of LibreOffice as their main suite, dropping MSO and contributing a small percentage of their per seat cost savings, then we could see some distrcits paying to have accessibility issues worked on or some other aspect of LibreOffice that would be of interest to them. In essence this was the idea behind setting up the INGOTs. Your idea is simpler *if* you can get agreement with large centralised bureaucracies. It's not easy, I have been trying for more than 10 years ;-) Schools in the UK make individual decisions about the resources they use. We had to make INGOT certification wider than just OOo/LO simply because mo= st are entrenched in MSO. OTOH we know some have switched as a result of learning more about FOSS through the certification process. If we can generate volume international take up, funding developers on the project would be easy. Whilst certification seems a good strategy, what about parental power being exerted upon schools? One would imagine that if parents (espcialy of low income families) were aware of free software, they would implore schools to follow suit. How do you get to those parents? Through the schools? ..Wait, isn't it the schools that are not ready to change? See the problem? Perhaps, but one would have expected parents and/or pupils to search via internet for 'free word processor' and hopefully an open source product would appear prominently in the search results. -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [tdf-discuss] Re: Paid developers
On Sat, 2011-05-14 at 12:29 +0100, Ian Lynch wrote: How do you get to those parents? Through the schools? ..Wait, isn't it the schools that are not ready to change? I think it varies with the country and perhaps the State. In Australia we have Parent-Teacher Associations, which could be the best place to reach parents directly. Also, the degree of autonomy of individual schools can vary a lot with the country and the state. Marc is, I believe, in Canada, which may have quite a different system than in the USA, for example. One person with experience getting free software into schools is Christian Einfeldt, a California lawyer and free software activist, who is based in San Francisco. Ian will remember Christian from that Linux expo we attended in San Diego some years ago. He's very active on Twitter these days; among other things, he talks about his successes (and failures) getting free s/w into schools. http://twitter.com/einfeldt --Jean -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
[tdf-discuss] Re: Paid developers
Le 2011-05-14 17:10, Jean Hollis Weber a écrit : On Sat, 2011-05-14 at 12:29 +0100, Ian Lynch wrote: How do you get to those parents? Through the schools? ..Wait, isn't it the schools that are not ready to change? I think it varies with the country and perhaps the State. In Australia we have Parent-Teacher Associations, which could be the best place to reach parents directly. Also, the degree of autonomy of individual schools can vary a lot with the country and the state. Marc is, I believe, in Canada, which may have quite a different system than in the USA, for example. One person with experience getting free software into schools is Christian Einfeldt, a California lawyer and free software activist, who is based in San Francisco. Ian will remember Christian from that Linux expo we attended in San Diego some years ago. He's very active on Twitter these days; among other things, he talks about his successes (and failures) getting free s/w into schools. http://twitter.com/einfeldt --Jean I finally found a link that I had archived. The Indiana Department of Education had plans of moving over 300,000 computers to Linux along with OOo. Here is the link: http://www.doe.in.gov/olt/InACCESS/index.html. Not sure if they did move to linux as there is no other mention on their site. We have had similar threads and discussions on this topic. When I have time, I'll try to document the main ideas on the wiki as this is one area of LibreOffice that does interest me. Network installation/updating and accessibility issues are what, IMHO, would slow down the adoption in the educational field. For LibreOffice adoption, countries where school autonomy from the point of view of software acquisition is where we can make in-roads with well placed marketing strategies. Cheers Marc in Canada :-) -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [tdf-discuss] Re: Paid developers
On 14 May 2011 17:56, Marc Paré m...@marcpare.com wrote: Hi Ian et al Le 2011-05-14 07:29, Ian Lynch a écrit : Whilst certification seems a good strategy, what about parental power being exerted upon schools? One would imagine that if parents (espcialy of low income families) were aware of free software, they would implore schools to follow suit. How do you get to those parents? Through the schools? ..Wait, isn't it the schools that are not ready to change? See the problem? If we want to get LibreOffice accepted at school level we need to make sure that our product has a solid reputation for network install and support. Incremental update capability would also have to be part of the package. Totally agree with this. OOo had some severe problems in the early days simply because it was not easy to install across hundreds of machines on a network. All schools tend to be organised on networks so installations will be hundreds of a machines at a time which is good and a real incentive to make it easy to maintain. Not sure of the situation now. Could it be improved? Cheers Marc -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted -- Ian Ofqual Accredited IT Qualifications The Schools ITQ www.theINGOTs.org +44 (0)1827 305940 You have received this email from the following company: The Learning Machine Limited, Reg Office, 36 Ashby Road, Tamworth, Staffordshire, B79 8AQ. Reg No: 05560797, Registered in England and Wales. -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
[tdf-discuss] Re: Paid developers
Hi Ian Le 2011-05-14 18:14, Ian Lynch a écrit : Totally agree with this. OOo had some severe problems in the early days simply because it was not easy to install across hundreds of machines on a network. All schools tend to be organised on networks so installations will be hundreds of a machines at a time which is good and a real incentive to make it easy to maintain. Not sure of the situation now. Could it be improved? I am on the dev list and I don't think that any devs have shown interest in this. Plus the fact that there are few devs who would have access to a network. We need to provided committed devs to network labs to test fully test out network installations and updates. I have 4 linux boxes and 2 windows boxes at home. I may turn my house into a server-run house this summer and test out network installation. Cheers Marc -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [tdf-discuss] Re: Paid developers
On 15/05/2011 03:58, Marc Paré wrote: Hi Ian Le 2011-05-14 18:14, Ian Lynch a écrit : Totally agree with this. OOo had some severe problems in the early days simply because it was not easy to install across hundreds of machines on a network. All schools tend to be organised on networks so installations will be hundreds of a machines at a time which is good and a real incentive to make it easy to maintain. Not sure of the situation now. Could it be improved? I am on the dev list and I don't think that any devs have shown interest in this. Plus the fact that there are few devs who would have access to a network. We need to provided committed devs to network labs to test fully test out network installations and updates. I have 4 linux boxes and 2 windows boxes at home. I may turn my house into a server-run house this summer and test out network installation. Cheers Marc I can help as well I have one windows desktop another drive on same desktop with linux a linux server, another windows laptop linux netbook and to macbooks -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [tdf-discuss] Re: Paid Developers
On 12 May 2011 17:55, Marc Paré m...@marcpare.com wrote: Le 2011-05-11 17:01, Samuel M a écrit : I believe, that The Document Foundation can employ Developers for LibreOffice. I believe the community is able to get the money for that on a monthly base. We saw that the community was able to rise 50.000€ in 8(!) days. It will be possible to get that money in a year for one full-time developer. These two examples show that this works even over a longer period of time (note that these projects are much smaller than LibreOffice): - Ardour (http://ardour.org): $4500 are raised every month to pay the main developer - Linux Mint (http://linuxmint.com): $5500 were raised in April to pay the main developer Despite from having full-time developers, for volunteer developers it would be nice to get money for fixing a specific bug / implementing a feature. Ardour has such a system where you can donate for a specific issue: http://ardour.org/bugbounty I think something like this would bring great benefit to LO, since users can show what they want to be fixed most and developers get some money for coding (or at their option donate it to TDF). To be honest, if we could convince most school districts in any country to adopt the use of LibreOffice as their main suite, dropping MSO and contributing a small percentage of their per seat cost savings, then we could see some distrcits paying to have accessibility issues worked on or some other aspect of LibreOffice that would be of interest to them. In essence this was the idea behind setting up the INGOTs. Your idea is simpler *if* you can get agreement with large centralised bureaucracies. It's not easy, I have been trying for more than 10 years ;-) Schools in the UK make individual decisions about the resources they use. We had to make INGOT certification wider than just OOo/LO simply because most are entrenched in MSO. OTOH we know some have switched as a result of learning more about FOSS through the certification process. If we can generate volume international take up, funding developers on the project would be easy. For anyone not familiar here is the essence of what we do. We provide certification for IT User skills accredited by the UK government and linked to the EU qualifications framework. We have two EU transfer of innovation grants to support take up in other countries with other grant applications made this year. We have said that if say a Writer certificate is gained with LO we can make that a LO certificate and give TDF a kick back for each certificate. That means we don't need to ask for what are either license fees or charitable donations from LO users, (well no harm in getting donations anyway if we can) we ask them to get their skills certified - something which most education people can identify with. Sell them education not technology. Of course the difficult side is to get the schools to take up LO and establishing the quality assurance systems for a credible international certification in new territory. At present we have to certificate other things because there simply isn't the volume of people using FOSS in schools to sustain the business. This is beginning to change though. We are adding a lot of value by providing an e-portfolio/VLE system and pupil progress tracking and reporting through custom Drupal modules. Videos here https://theingots.org/community/videotraining if interested. Many other educational suppliers charge a lot for these facilities using proprietary apps but without the certification, we are providing that support as simple value added using FOSS. We now have the facilities to certify every subject in every level of the school curriculum (based on the UK National Curriculum but in principle we could do the same with any national system that is standards based) and include learners with Special Educational Needs. Since most of this development work is done we can charge low rates for users. In volume say a couple of dollars a certificate, its designed to scale and we support multiple languages. There are about 7 million learners in the UK schools alone and we currently have active project presence in Malaysia, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Germany, Spain, Romania, Netherlands, Kenya, and USA with interest in a few others. It is all embryonic but we do get an income so some at least are prepared to pay. Not a big enough volume yet so we use the EU grants to support development. We have more recently had interest from two or three large players in the qualifications market - any one of these would make a very significant difference simply acting as a marketing vector. We just keep on developing until it is just a no-brainer. So, yes, there are certainly some models that could be followed in fund raising that could prove advantageous to the LibreOffice project and users. Sensible thing is to do the easy things first like getting donations targeted on a specific goal like developing some high
[tdf-discuss] Re: Paid Developers
Hi Ian Le 2011-05-13 05:27, Ian Lynch a écrit : Thanks for the info on the INGOTs. Having served on committees in charge of software acquisition, both at local and provincial level, I find the greatest reluctance on adopting is simply networking. While many of our school districts would like to move to LibreOffice, the vast majority rely on recommendations from their IT departments which are MS certified. In order to provide greater acceptance of our product we need to supply solid support from the point of view its network-ability. IT departments need to know that LibreOffice will work on their network and if there are problems that help is readily available. If there is no such service then the cost/seat is irrelevant -- MS Office is then kept. So, in my mind, we (the LibreOffice membership) should establish efficient national network help support. That is to say, for example, in my case, IT departments would have support help from LibreOffice.ca. There should also be for profit support available locally should IT departments prefer to acquire this support. We could easily promote both support models on a national scale if we were to have enough national developers attracted to our project alongside a certification programme. Perhaps to start off, we could offer free certification for dev's interested in the networking programming area of LibreOffice ... just to seed such a programme. As a side note -- Dev's interested in the networking, connectivity of LibreOffice would also need access to a network lab of computers to expand/trouble-shoot network related issues. LibreOffice could maybe establish regional headquarters where it would fund labs where devs could physically work on networking issues. Research and development funds could be raised with this purpose in mind. Cheers Marc -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
[tdf-discuss] Re: Paid developers
On 12 May 2011 17:55, Marc Paré m...@marcpare.com wrote: Le 2011-05-11 17:01, Samuel M a écrit : I believe, that The Document Foundation can employ Developers for LibreOffice. I believe the community is able to get the money for that on a monthly base. We saw that the community was able to rise 50.000€ in 8(!) days. It will be possible to get that money in a year for one full-time developer. These two examples show that this works even over a longer period of time (note that these projects are much smaller than LibreOffice): - Ardour (http://ardour.org): $4500 are raised every month to pay the main developer - Linux Mint (http://linuxmint.com): $5500 were raised in April to pay the main developer Despite from having full-time developers, for volunteer developers it would be nice to get money for fixing a specific bug / implementing a feature. Ardour has such a system where you can donate for a specific issue: http://ardour.org/bugbounty I think something like this would bring great benefit to LO, since users can show what they want to be fixed most and developers get some money for coding (or at their option donate it to TDF). To be honest, if we could convince most school districts in any country to adopt the use of LibreOffice as their main suite, dropping MSO and contributing a small percentage of their per seat cost savings, then we could see some distrcits paying to have accessibility issues worked on or some other aspect of LibreOffice that would be of interest to them. In essence this was the idea behind setting up the INGOTs. Your idea is simpler *if* you can get agreement with large centralised bureaucracies. It's not easy, I have been trying for more than 10 years ;-) Schools in the UK make individual decisions about the resources they use. We had to make INGOT certification wider than just OOo/LO simply because most are entrenched in MSO. OTOH we know some have switched as a result of learning more about FOSS through the certification process. If we can generate volume international take up, funding developers on the project would be easy. Whilst certification seems a good strategy, what about parental power being exerted upon schools? One would imagine that if parents (espcialy of low income families) were aware of free software, they would implore schools to follow suit. -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
[tdf-discuss] Re: Paid Developers
Le 2011-05-11 17:01, Samuel M a écrit : I believe, that The Document Foundation can employ Developers for LibreOffice. I believe the community is able to get the money for that on a monthly base. We saw that the community was able to rise 50.000€ in 8(!) days. It will be possible to get that money in a year for one full-time developer. These two examples show that this works even over a longer period of time (note that these projects are much smaller than LibreOffice): - Ardour (http://ardour.org): $4500 are raised every month to pay the main developer - Linux Mint (http://linuxmint.com): $5500 were raised in April to pay the main developer Despite from having full-time developers, for volunteer developers it would be nice to get money for fixing a specific bug / implementing a feature. Ardour has such a system where you can donate for a specific issue: http://ardour.org/bugbounty I think something like this would bring great benefit to LO, since users can show what they want to be fixed most and developers get some money for coding (or at their option donate it to TDF). To be honest, if we could convince most school districts in any country to adopt the use of LibreOffice as their main suite, dropping MSO and contributing a small percentage of their per seat cost savings, then we could see some distrcits paying to have accessibility issues worked on or some other aspect of LibreOffice that would be of interest to them. For example, a per seat cost for some districs in Canada cost around $50/seat for MSO. In my school district, we have approximately 10,000 computers. If my school district were to adopt LibreOffice and offer to the LibreOffice project an amount of $150,000, my district would still be saving approximately $350,000/year (note: I am just using the $50/seat as an hypothetical amount and I do not know the true amount for my board). Imagine, if we could accomplish this for the province where I live, we could potentially have access to approximately 72 districts. The amount of saving on the school district/provincial level would be extremely high and we could benefit from a larger amount of $$$. In this example $11 million dollars from 1 province in Canada if this model were followed. So, yes, there are certainly some models that could be followed in fund raising that could prove advantageous to the LibreOffice project and users. Cheers Marc -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
