Hi all, A while ago there was a blog by Nelson on LibreOffice. I had a quick look and thought 'Ok so you don't get the dynamics of Free Software huh'* but didn't think about it otherwise.
Then the blog was selected as one of the articles in the Weekly News, put together by the hard work of Sascha and his team. Which tickled of some rough feathers at the LibreOffice camp - as you can imagine after reading the blog. There was a link to an article putting down the LibreOffice efforts (part of openSUSE!) - in an 'official' openSUSE news article! So, I don't really want to discuss the blogpost itself - it's the personal vision of Nelson and I get the point he was trying to get across). Even if his critisism was completely founded and sensible, the question I have is: should it have been in the Weekly news? That is actually something Nelson can surely comment upon: does it make sense, from a marketing perspective, to put your 'dirty laundry' (internal discussions and critisism) out to the world if you don't have too? Frankly, I have had this discussion in KDE as well - some argued that even on Planet KDE, critisism did not belong. Planet, as they saw it, was a communicationchannel OUTWARDS. If you had critique, say it on a mailinglist or in private, use planet for positive comments. I disagreed with that - imho planet is for community discussion and personal views, hence should be open for critisism. But for something like the weekly news, I think it might make sense for the team doing it to think about what their purpose is - yes, informing the community. But those part of it or very close most likely do follow the planet. The weekly news is most likely read by users further away from the project and journalists and such - who don't have to be bothered by infighting or bad news ;-) Yes, I am saying the Weekly News is a great marketing asset - and hence should be treated as such. Comments? As usual, feel free to disagree and fall all over me now - but please end it with a hug :D Jos * so the blog was about the marketing side of the fork. Sure. Still, it was a bit clueless - indeed, from a marketing point it's not smart to create two projects - from the Free Software dynamics pov it's the best thing that has happened to OpenOffice in years and it should've happened years ago... Marketing is clearly secondairy here. And yes, I imagine it would be fun to see the marketing battle. From a FOSS perspective - I just hope it won't take LibreOffice long to win. Link to the blog in question: http://nmarques.digitalwhores.net/2010/10/18/openoffice-org-and-libre-office/
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