Re: [libreoffice-users] Re: Trivia Question - Further Observation

Hi :)
Hopefully some of those issues will be discussed and agreed, perhaps even voted 
on as the official membership  grows.  Hopefully issues will be up for further 
discussions again when the membership is much larger again.  


Support Contracts need to be available for very much less and hopefully will 
be.  A £200 GBP / month is reaching the realms of paying an in-house dev.  Maybe 
only about 6hours/month (including over-heads) but way beyond the reach of most 
users.  


Regards from
Tom :)




________________________________
From: Alexander Thurgood <alex.thurgood@gmail.com>
To: users@libreoffice.org
Sent: Sun, 29 May, 2011 8:58:24
Subject: [libreoffice-users] Re: Trivia Question - Further Observation

Le 28/05/11 09:57, timi@iafrica.com a écrit :

Hi,

> Thanks Alex.... Appreciate your thoughts..
>
> Does that mean I have to buy special support to correct bugs in a "released" 
> version of LibO?
>
> If then you might as well cut the hype about open system and charge licence 
> fee's like MS.... 
>
> at least then we might get an Impress that basically works.

Not as such, because some bugs will be fixed eventually whatever
happens, but :

- if you want "enterprise stability" in LibreOffice, the advice I have
been given and told to disseminate is to take out a support contract
with one of the more general enterprise support providers (Novell, Suse,
RedHat, Ubuntu ?, others ?) which are specifically offering LibreOffice
support ;

- taking out a support contract will help those companies, who currently
contribute code to the development of LibreOffice, to prioritise bug
fixing and feature development

- it makes no difference if the bug you have discovered was part of a
functionality already included in Impress or some weird behaviour that
you might have discovered from one version to the next - development and
releases will continue irrespective of such consideration ;

- even functionality that used to work in previous OOo versions, and no
longer works in LibO, will not necessarily receive priority treatment -
the major stopppers are bugs that cause crashes, and only then if they
are multiplatform, mulit-OS (with a slight preference for Linux and
Windows) and are perceived by the core developers as affecting many users.


I doubt that you will find any of the above written down _clearly_ in
any of the Foundation's, or LibreOffice.org's website pages, although
much of it is present in the various discussion lists (developer,
foundation, marketing). It is one of my major gripes with the project as
it currently stands that there is a lot of "hype" and very little down
to earth "in your face" explanation of a consensus of where the project
should be going. Perhaps that is just down to my personality of
requiring things to be as clear as possible up front so that at least I
can weigh up whether it is potentially worth investing more in the
project than I currently do (and I am already fairly heavily involved).

An example : can anyone point me to a webpage from the Foundation or the
LibreOffice.org site where it clearly states that LibreOffice is not
intended for business use or that if you are a business you should buy
support ?


FWIW, if you trawl around the net a bit, you can find enterprise support
vendors for LibreOffice :

http://www.credativ.co.uk/services/support/projects/office/libreoffice/
at 200 GBP / month
whether such a contract will actually get your bug problem fixed is
another matter...


http://www.lanedo.com/libreoffice.html
No publicly accessible pricing that I could see. They also offer to
actually fix bugs.


HTH,

Alex













-- 
Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to users+help@libreoffice.org
Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette
List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/www/users/
All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
-- 
Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to users+help@libreoffice.org
Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette
List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/www/users/
All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted