[libreoffice-marketing] Re: Obstacles to ODF adoption

Le 2010-11-01 12:05, jonathon a écrit :
> On 10/28/2010 04:21 PM, Drew Jensen wrote:
>
> > > Religious organizations are another are where costs and document portability might not be a major 
> > > concern because everyone is using the
>
> Small non-profits tend to have big issues with compatibility, because
> they typically use old software that is no longer supported.
>
> Those microsoft grants are not all that they are cracked up to be. So
> much so, that even with a grant, the costs involved in complying with
> the terms of the grant are such, that the organization would be better
> off refusing the grant.

I help "coordinate" a person who is heavily involved in an evangelical 
church. I can tell you that, yes, the software is usually quite old in 
version. The software licences are paid and legal. However, she does 
struggle quite a bit with trying to work with their older software and 
supplying them materials for Sunday services.

The reasons that churches are apprehensive of using pirated software (at 
least in Canada) is that years ago a church group in the US was using 
photocopied manuscript for their choir, and, after having been warned by 
the copyright holder to quit using photocopies several times, the church 
was charged quite a sizeable amount of money for the infraction. This 
had quite the ripple effect amongst many churches. Most churches now 
have a very sizeable library of music manuscripts that are legally 
bought and paid for. Many churches applied this to all purchases and to 
software purchases.

Churches depend a lot on the good will of those individuals in their 
congregation who are able to help them out with their software 
purchases, but, most churches struggle with their ability to pay for 
upgrades.

> > > same thing so there are no problems
>
> > have met many people from small congregations in the forums
>
> One of the big hurdles that FLOSS advocates have to face, when trying to
> migrate religious organizations to FLOSS, is the lack of usable software
> that is functionally equivalent to their (usually pirated) Windows product.
>
> The significant software there is the one that handles membership data,
> scheduling, sermon preparation, service co-ordination, lyric
> presentation, and any number of church stuff that nobody but the church
> secretary, the board of elders, and the pastor know about.
>
> jonathon

Agreed. In fact if you look closely to the software, you could probably 
handle most of it through LibO with the use of styles and templating.

By coincidence, I just had this conversation with an individual at 
another evangelical church this week. They are in the process of 
test-trying software and have mostly made up their mind. But this 
individual's understanding of the software and description of its 
workings, was pretty well describing routines that could be handled by 
simple templates in LibO.

I have her partly interested in creating some templates for evangelical 
churches (Canadian) for LibO. I am hoping that she will have time to 
submit some templates in the near future.

Marc



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