A thing about FOSS that is good, is that there is more than one voice
involved in the way the product will be designed/used/etc.. MS people
tend to say - This is what you are going to use now and this is how your
will do it. Products involved with many companies helping with the
development, listens to more than one voice to make the decisions in how
to use the product, what it can do, and what it will be like for the
user experience.
MS will not likely stop being a big company and provide the products and
services they feel the market needs. For a FOSS package, it is good to
have a large base of volunteers and companies that provide development
of the product. Sure, with everything in the hands of one company and
its highly stressed development teams under the control of one manager
[that may be just a professional manager] - could be a good thing for a
product. But is that better for the user or just better for the
company's product manager? MS has in the past shown that they are not
in sync with its users, and has done so many times. With the FOSS
model, it is hard not to include the user of the package in its
development process. Volunteers tend not to want to work on a product
that the users will not want to use. MS makes a package and tell the
users - here it is so use it the way we tell you to use it.
The article was written the first week of November, and I think I have
read it before.
I think packages that cares about the user, like LibreOffice does, will
be successful and gain market shares from the products that do not
include the users in development of the product, like MS does..
On 11/25/2012 11:38 AM, Tom Davies wrote:
Hi :)
It's interesting that there has been almost no posts about articles such as
this one.
https://www.linux.com/news/software/applications/660608-libreoffice-a-continuing-tale-of-foss-success
There are some interesting stats that are very well presented in there and it's
worth using to spread the word of how LibreOffice works.
For me one of the key things that no article seems to mention is that while
many hefty companies are vanishing seemingly overnight it seems somewhat
dangerous to rely on just one. It would be like not making back-ups of
critical information!! If we can bear to think of LO and AOO as being similar
enough that users can migrate from one to the other fairly easily and thus as
being 2 prioducts supported by 1 community then that community is massive.
Taken as being 1 product it is so robust that even if 1 or 2 companoes the size
of IBM or Google (or RedHat or SUSE) were to simply vanish overnight then there
would still be a good product out there. By sticking with MS people are
risking everything they have by being so heavily dependant on just 1 company
and that company is losing market share to mobile devices. Perhaps Win8 might
help them recover the OS battle but it might not.
Regards from
Tom :)
________________________________
From: "frido...@kathan.co.nz" <frido...@kathan.co.nz>
To: market...@global.libreoffice.org
Sent: Sunday, 4 November 2012, 8:07
Subject: [libreoffice-marketing] Good Article for LibreOffice
A positive & informative article about LibreOffice.
https://www.linux.com/news/software/applications/660608-libreoffice-a-continuing-tale-of-foss-success
Greetings from Tauranga
Fridolin
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