[libreoffice-marketing] Re: Making LibO Remarkable 2

Le 2011-01-02 16:46, Sadiq S a écrit :
> My problem is another beast entirely. I am a highschool student and so of
> course are my peers.
>
> I know of only friend who uses OpenOffice, and this is because she doesn't
> like paying for MS Office suite and the hassle of pirating it. Not because
> it's free software.
>
> How do I go around explaining how LibreOffice is better?

This is quite simple: most of the OpenOffice communities have moved to 
the LibreOffice suite;  we now number around 90 LibreOffice developers 
many of whom were with OpenOffice; LibreOffice is what would have been 
the natural outgrowth of OpenOffice as a foundation but for reasons of 
trademarked name (Oracle would not relinquish the name to The Document 
Foundation), LibreOffice was borne; the number of enhancements will 
arrive quicker with LibreOffice rather than the OpenOffice model; she 
can participate in a community where her voice does make a difference; 
LibreOffice is a community product and we all share responsibility in 
its quality and finally, it is just a better product.

> Unfortunately, the situation with the dialysis provider is something that is
> very similar to the situation here at the TDSB. I assume that Microsoft has
> given some sort of deal to the TDSB to keep using MS Office. They recently
> updated to XP, which I see as a renewal of the contract.

In Ontario, all school boards use Microsoft products many of which are 
priced as cost per seat. When contracts are negotiated, the IT 
departments do as much as possible to reduce the amount of cost per seat 
(that is the cost of software for every computer) in their board. This 
is their mandate. IT department will do this if this means renewing 
licences for Windows on every seat to lower the MSO suite cost per seat. 
I find that IT departments will adopt alternatives when these are easily 
implemented over their networks (many of these use Novel). If the 
network installation is not easily accomplished and maintained then they 
will keep the structure that has a proven track record. TCO (total cost 
of ownership) is high up on their list of concerns.

To gain a foothold in school boards, LibreOffice will have to make sure 
that it will be easily network installable and maintained. It will also 
have to prove having a robust file interoperability especially for MSO 
file formats. We are not at the point where opensource file formats  are 
the norm in N. America. Once a school board in a province has moved to 
LibreOffice in one of its provincially run schoolboards, many will 
follow suit. Getting a foothold in one schoolboard will be the one that 
will start the domino effect. After this point, the migration to 
LibreOffice will be unstoppable.

> My point being, we have to fight the market entrenchment and make
> LibreOffice better than any other office suite.

Let's not forget that the source code that LibreOffice uses is that of 
(essentially OpenOffice) and that many more code corrections and 
enhancements have been made. OpenOffice does have a good track record, 
LibreOffice at this point just happens to have better code and 10 years 
worth of experience under a different name. :-)

> Regards,
> -------
> Sadiq S
> staticsafe on Freenode
> mailto: sadiq.9541@gmail.com
> http://staticsafe.me | http://asininetech.com
> Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.
> See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html

Cheers

Marc


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