[marketing-dev] Re: New strategies for OO (new subject)

Hola Ramon!


On 2011-05-19, at 11:44 , Ramon Sole wrote:

> Hello Louis, *
> 
> it would be terrific if the core OOo team decided to build a start-up around OpenOffice.

You sound naive :-)

It's not their decision, unless part of that decision entails a vow of poverty. Who will pay them? Who will pay for the site? Who will pay for everything?

This money is also not something that is freely distributable. it has to be considered either as a business expense, like all software, or an investment, or something in-between, and it competes with already committed allocations to companies like MSFT, which are known and familiar, if sometimes too familiar. But you don't lose your job doing the same old with MSFT; you may, people believe, with Foss, especially with a Foss project that has shown itself to be so fractured with internal division as to prefer cutting off its own nose to spite its face.


> 
> I'm pretty sure they would find quite easily some business angels who could invest a bunch of money.

Really? You are also optimistic. Didn't working for Sun teach you anything? :-)

I mean, look where Jonathan's glamourous optimism got us: Oracle.

> 10 M$ is not a lot of money for a start-up who already has millions of customers and users. Probably it's the opportunity of their lives!. They were a small company -StarDivision- a few years ago, nobody knew about them and their product has become, probably, the biggest open source project ever competing directly with MS! As evarybody knows MS has had marketing campaigns directed against OO, which probaaly costed as much as the 10 M you talked about!

Let's be serious. The maintenance cost does not even include the copyright cost, if any. And it's not a trivial cost. I've dwelt on this issue, as have others. it is all about business, not at all about what is good for society, humanity, the people of the world. It is not even really about saving money in the immediate. It is about staking out valuable territory in a new market. Persuading people of this is not impossible. I've done it. But it is one thing to persuade of your vision, another to persuade away from the status quo, and yet another to persuade to commit sums of money; and yet another to persuade to arrange a context for all this that can promote sustained development of the code, not just one-off and ad hoc work.

And if you think that the act of persuasion can be written in the preterite, once it's done, just look at Brazil under the new Minister of Culture.  


> 
> Furthermore, many other people could bring more money to that. How many people would buy some shares of OpenOffice (Inc, Ltd, GmbH or whatever it would be), just for help a be part of the ownership of OOo? Big users should think about it.

Again, this has been considered, as has the sort of NGO. I prefer Apache, to situate OOo as a nonprofit operating within the Apache frame. But I am also open to TDF, if the licensing scheme can be arranged to promote business expansion. What counts for me is the expansion and security of the ODF market. It's absolutely vital and I daresay more important than OOo qua OOo. Without the ODF market—the myriad of implementations—we are niche.


> 
> OpenOffice may not be a good businesss to Oracle, who can sell their database licenses for thousand of dollars, but it can be a very profitable business for a small start-up company.

Indeed. And it still is. But the future is in needs of securitization. 
> 
> Anyway, consider to send your open letter to the big-users community. It's wonderful Peugeot, the French Police, the Finnish Governement, the city of Munich or Zaragoza use OpenOffice. It's time n

I would, but do you honestly think I've not previously approached not just those above but others, too? And guess what. They say, We love open source! As long as it is cheap and does not demand a centavo from us, or even better, as long as a big company is willing to do all the work …. 

Community is a process. It is a kind of joy, not an obligation as such, but it is all the same a process, and just like it's sometimes easier to sit at home and watch YouTube than to go out to a party or make a video of your own, so too is the momentum of commodity culture, and all it implies about consumer passivity, overwhelming. But not always.


> ow to ask them a little of support to the community. Ask them just a few EUR or USD per user and probably you get the budget for some years!

Nope. What happens is that they say: We have millions for software. Just ask MSFT. And if we switch over, then… usual story of needing an analogue to MSFT. I know this, I know it well. I've for this reason tried to work with Asolif and others around the world, to provide that single, coherent and reliable business point of entry: the single vendor kind of analogue. And sometimes it works, but more often the status quo prevails. Compelling arguments are not compelling if it's not against rationality but irrational habitude you fight against. Status quo is costly but cheaper than actually doing something, esp. if it's your job on the line or just about as bad, your effort. And I've tried, Ramon, I've tried. Doesn't mean I won't try again, just that I am hardly naive, hardly optimistic. But I am realistic, and do see the value in what we do and why it's important.

I do think it is compelling that we work with SMBs; but I also think it is absolutely necessary that a) the community of OOo and LO reunite and reconcile, so that we can be strongly stepping into the future; and b) that IBM, Red Hat, Canonical, and even Google (as well as of course Novell/Attachmate) collaborate under the same roof to share the immense costs of making this thing they all benefit from and which even more will add to. 


> 
> Just my 5 cents.
> 
> Let's try make OpenOffice -together with LO if possible- the most used office suite. It would be really a pitty to stop now.

Actually, it would be a tragedy.

> 
> Ramon


Cheers
Louis
> 
> Louis Suarez-Potts wrote:
>> :-)
>> 
>> I am.
>> 
>> My strategies are, obviously, to invoke the established stakeholders—IBM, Red Hat, to name but two, but also Google—in the gambit. But the issue is even more interesting than money alone. Much of the secret of OOo's sauce lies not in the recipe, which is open, but in the makers, who are like chefs the world round, only more so. And with Oracle's renunciation, they are obviously affected. How, it's not clear. But if I were in the team, I'd be no doubt updating my résumé—and be fending off hot solicitations.
>> 
>> In short, time is of the essence.
>> 
>> LibreOffice, TDF, do not have the full resources to continue, let alone advance OOo. They can differentiate it, which is to be lauded, but they have their own uncertainties. They do not appeal, too, to enterprises; we do. Enterprises can be public sector or private. They have the same concerns: reliability, predictability, stability, and super-good QA.
>> 
>> That all takes money not just in the present but in the future. So, these are not trivial points.
>> 
>> I've been working sub rosa because that's the way this is done. And even so, I've been pretty much shut out of a lot of discourse. Oracle has been absolutely mum about OOo's copyright and development future, though I've asked. They are surely in talks with the usual suspects, at least, I hope so. But the discussions are hardly including the OOo community—not me, at least, and not really any I know involved with OOo.
>> 
>> What I'll do is what I promised earlier: write an open letter to Edward Screven, the Oracle VP who issued the announcement 15 April.
>> 
>> And I also would very much appreciate it, and I think the entire OOo community would, too, if IBM and other stakeholders, such as Google and Red Hat execcs-I'll spare names—would engage the community representatives, in the plural or even singular, to proceed. What counts here is not my presence or participation per se, that's irrelevant and immaterial, but the continuation of OOo as that set of tools enterprises and users the world round expect to be there, as a community thing is.
>> 
>> So, we are doing things. And I just wish I could speak more, or write more on this. I also wish I had more to speak, write, say. But you see the issues. They are not secret, they are not hard to comprehend, they are not hard to digest. We need not just the funds but the chefs, and we need not jus to continue status quo—that did not work, obviously—but to re-do things, re-set things, improve: no one liked the old logistics of power, all wanted change. This is our opportunity, and let's begin with the reconciliation, with the stakeholders, so that we can continue working on this.
>> 
>> And one more point: OOo makes money. It makes money not just for the ecosystem stakeholders, like Ian, Jean, and many many others, including me, now—but for the stakeholders, in much the same way that an Eclipse like platform or Apache does. By providing the source technology that creates new markets.
>> 
>> -louis
>> 
>> On 2011-05-18, at 19:21 , Jean Hollis Weber wrote:
>> 
>>> On Thu, 2011-05-19, Ian Lynch wrote:
>>> 
>>>>  if we need 10m per year lets work out strategies to generate it.
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> +1
>>> 
>>> --Jean
>>> 
>>> 
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