Hi Kirill,
Kirill Palagin (Y) schrieb:
(I probably should have stated the reasoning behind the idea first)
For me the reasoning was clear from the beginning:
Get money to help OOo in many fields...
I very much would like OO to succeed and to me success is measured in
number of users (both new and converted from competitors).
For OOo success is measured not only in more users but in more
contributors - and you will lose many contributors, if they feel "sold"
to Yahoo or Google (you probably know that there are concerns about Sun
as major sponsor already).
[...]
Without some major promotion we would not get many new users and
major promotions cost major money. I see only one way to earn this
kind of money - allow somebody to piggyback on us. We are likely to
loose some users and allienate some, but hopefully much more will
come to us.
You don't take in account the contributors.
And there has been good promotional campaigns in the past - ask Benjamin
Horst about his experiences for example.
So we either can play fundamentalism (Stallman-style) and pass good
opportunity in the name of being free (also free from customers) or
be pragmatic (like Linus Torvalds) and sacrifice a little to gain a
lot.
That's a bit polemic, isn't it?
- and you don't know if you sacrifice a lot to gain a little.
And to reiterate the idea - I am not talking about modifying OO in
any way, just including somebody's toolbar in installer (like we do
for Java).
OOo2 needs Java for full functionality - that's quite a difference.
But you may find a contributor for a version (or contribute it yourself)
that includes the toolbar. If you donate the money you get back to the
community I am all for it.
But we avoid advertising in the program (except the splash screen) and
on our website (except some dedicated pages) on purpose - I don't think,
changing this attitude will help us more than keeping it.
Thanks for reading this far. WBR, K. Palagin.
Please don't feel offended - your goal is comprehensible. But in my (of
course personal) opinion it's the wrong way.
Best regards
Bernhard
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