Re: [libreoffice-marketing] LO vs AOO : GPL/LGPL vs ASL licences

LGPL/MPL (copyleft) are superior to AL (permissive) when applied to
desktop software such as office suites because they are definitely able
to attract more volunteer developers and probably more companies, and a
larger hackers community is able to develop more features and solve a
higher number of regressions and bugs.

History tells that the only company attracted by permissive licenses
when applied to office suites is IBM, although IBM - in the case of AOO
- is not investing a large enough amount of money to sustain the growth
of the software, given that the permissive license is not attracting
volunteer developers (with a few exceptions).

By the way, I personally do not like permissive licenses, and find the
term "permissive" a clear marketing spin. When asked about permissive
licenses, I prefer to use the term "predatory", because they allow
corporations to predate the work of volunteers.

But this is just a personal opinion, and I am not a developer but just
an old marketer.

On 1/1/13 4:15 PM, Immanuel Giulea wrote:

> When I switched from OOo to LO, I didn't notice any big differences.

Actually, AOO is probably 18 months behind LibreOffice in term of
development, and is also missing most of the development back office,
such as tinderboxes, automated tests, source code bibisect and gerrit,
which has been created from scratch by LibreOffice developers (as it did
not exist back at OOo).

> If not for the differences in licences, why should end-users choose LO over
> AOO when migrating away from MSO? How is LO a "better product"?

More features, larger development community, independence from a single
corporate sponsor, larger number of languages available for interface,
wider corporate support (SUSE, RedHat, Google and Intel, plus other
companies paying developers such as Canonical).

> In marketing, this is essential. Competitive advantage. AOO is the original
> project. LO the fork.

Technically speaking, AOO is a fork as much as LibreOffice, as the
license has been changed and some portions of the code - because they
were GPL/LGPL - have been replaced. AOO has the advantage of the brand
name, because Oracle allows AOO to leverage the old OOo brand equity,
but the brand is diluting over time.

> LO will release version 4 in midfeb. AOO will release in April. MSO 2013
> sometime in the next three months will be available to consumers.

The release date of AOO 4.0 has not been set, at least from what you can
read on the AOO mailing lists. In addition, there has been a drop of
deveopment activity after graduation, as you can easily spot from Ohloh:
http://www.ohloh.net/p/openoffice/contributors/summary (set the
timeframe to 1 year to have a better feeling of the drop).

Of course, there might be some "hidden" development activity at IBM,
although it is rather strange that nothing has happened on the web and
the wiki (because AOO, to inflate numbers, has added web and wiki code
to repositories monitored by Ohloh, which is reflected under Languages
by the 21% of HTML code and the 10% of XML code).

Microsoft is a different story, because they will put a very large
amount of money behind the new version of MS Office. In my experience,
the most effective marketing strategy against MS is reactive, because
you can leverage MS efforts.

> Marketing strategies need to be targeted:
> For large organisations. For small business. For government. For consumers.

We should always rememebr that we cannot compete with Microsoft using
traditional marketing strategies, because the money they can put on the
table is changing the game. We can play guerrilla marketing strategies,
which might be quite effective, and guerrilla marketing strategies are
less structured and targeted (by definition).

I would avoid falling into the "feature trap" created by Microsoft,
because the reality is that 80% of the features of office suites are the
same, and 20% are different because the developers are different
(although they try to answer the same customer needs).

Of course, having a feature comparison might be useful, but I would not
use it as a selling point against any product. Free software has other
selling points which are specific and unique, although they are more
difficult to explain to the majority of the users.

We cannot avoid to invest a large amount of our efforts in educating
users to understand free software.

> LO already dominates Linux and this is great. So let's consider Windows and
> Mac OS.

Windows is definitely the main target, because the concentration around
MS Office is higher. On the Mac there are several office suites: Apple
iWorks, MS Office, LibreOffice, AOO and NeoOffice. In addition, many Mac
users are not using office suites because of their job.

-- 
Italo Vignoli - italo.vignoli@gmail.com
mob +39.348.5653829 - VoIP 5316436@messagenet.it
skype italovignoli - gtalk italo.vignoli@gmail.com

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