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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