Re: [libreoffice-users] Re: [libreoffice-marketing] Good Article for LibreOffice

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: "fridolin@kathan.co.nz" <fridolin@kathan.co.nz>
> > To: marketing@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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