On Fri, 2005-03-18 at 02:27, Christian Einfeldt wrote: > > Plus, IMHO it is important to give the devil his due. Sun has done > a great job of open sourcing OOo, and they have created a decent > and powerful office suite. > > I hope that people will pay attention to this statement: OOo is > going to BRING MICROSOFT DOWN.
I'd put it slightly different, OOo is going to decimate MSO as lead product, lower prices and improve convenience for everyone and make it easier for GNU/Linux to be established at the desktop. Whether that brings MS down is another matter, it will certainly make a big difference to that company but what really matters is the effect on users of software. The only real uncertainty is the timescale. At the worst end Sun could abandon OOo and leave it at 2.0 to fend for itself, diverting all the developer effort into Star Office. Of course most people would then just ignore Star Office as yet another proprietary office suite and Sun would be left with its current marginal desktop share of the market. Goodbye Sun. Development work on OOo would then slow down for a while until we figured out how to support it but I think it would pick up again. Who knows some big players might then jump in. At the best end, Sun open up the website and make contributing easier, fund additional hackers and actively try and get governments to participate. The development accelerates and so does the quality of the product. We are inbetween these two extremes. While we don't want to scare Sun away, if there are realistic prospects of improvement we should try to change things if in the overall scheme of things the benefits outweigh the effort. As I see it we could put in a lot of effort, upset some good people and still not get very far because really we haven't any positive bargaining chips. We can threaten to withdraw labour (negative), we can threaten to pillory a project lead or two and even remove them (negative). Would this really make a difference if they are constrained by Sun's policies? I'd say bide our time until we have more positive levers such as, bringing some substantial resource to the party *if* they do x, y and Z. > So let's please first marginalize > Microsoft before fine tuning OOo's governance. I'm not too bothered aboout MS per se. But I think the highest priority is to maximise the OOo development within whatever constraints we find ourselves. I'm as impatient as anyone, really Daniel I am. But we don't want you burnt out fighting political battles that really have complex constraints around them when there are plenty of other areas that you can and do really make a difference. (And you mustn't forget to make sure you pass those math exams ;-) ) > Yes, and that is going to come out in the Digital Tipping Point > film. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/panorama/416244.stm Why not contact the BBC Panorama programme and suggest a documentary? > I literally think that the US has abandoned much of the high > ground in the area of freedom in cyberspace, and the rest of the > world is going to save our butts here in the US. DMCA. Broadcast > flag. That is seriously negative stuff. I mean, think about it. > I can't watch my own purchased videos on my own Linux computers! > How insane is that! Irony is that this is in the context of all the Bush rhetoric about freedom :-) > Daniel is already on the community council, and so he should try to > use his office to organize political change. But I think that the > minority should also expect to be able to carry the burden of > persuasion, to borrow a term from the law, because IMHO the burden > rests with them to generate the political will within the group to > achieve the change they desire. +1 -- Ian Lynch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ZMS Ltd
