Re: [tdf-discuss] German Foreign Office is dropping only open source software policy

[Friedrich Strohmaier]

Hi plino, *,

plino schrieb:

> 
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/227849/open_source_advocates_angry_at_german_govt_decision.html

> This isn't even about OpenOffice vs LibreOffice... It's about Closed
> Source vs Open Source

right..

> TBH I think it was a bad move to change radically if you have
> experienced and productive users trained on whatever program
> (regardless of the license).

agreed - but I think this wasn't the real reason.

> Also, if you need professional support you can't just move to Open
> Source, let alone a Linux distro that was still being developed...

I think this can't been estimated without viewing on the political
situation. Two Years ago FDP's Guido Westerwelle became boss of the
foreign office. The FDP (Free Domocratic Party) is known to serve a
special clientele. So shortly after the elections the sales tax for
hoteliers was lowered on the food products level (7% instead of 19%).

> Could it be that it took them 6 years to realize that?

No, it was two years to schedule the change after the change.
For me no question, who was the gostwriter of the reasoning - there is a
big company we know that kind of arguing from..



Gruß/regards
-- 
Friedrich
Libreoffice-Box http://libreofficebox.org/
LibreOffice and more on CD/DVD images



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Re: [tdf-discuss] mailing list content disappearance

[Christian Lohmaier]

Hi "e-letter" - a realname would be nice...

On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 10:36 PM, e-letter  wrote:
> On 13/05/2011, discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org
>  wrote:
>> Topics (messages 6130 through 6131):
>>
>> [tdf-discuss] Re: Paid Developers
>>       6130 - Ian Lynch 
>>       6131 - ??? 
>
> When can someone improve mailing list behaviour with web mail clients
> like gmail???

Sorry, but what do you mean?
Obviously the mailinglist has no influence whatsoever how a webmail or
regular mailclient behaves.

> Even for this e-mail digest, the reply function results
> in deletion of the original message content, apart from the text shown
> above. This means a text editor has to be used...:(

Sorry, please be more descriptive. That mail (#6131) is this one:
http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss@documentfoundation.org/msg06225.html
http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/msg06096.html

As you mentioned gmail: Gmail will not show your own messages as it
will be received by the mailinglist, but only as it leaves gmail,
similarily gmail doesn't properly quote html-messages when replying in
text-only mode ("quoting level" gets lost). So what is the exact
problem?

ciao
Christian

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[tdf-discuss] Re: Paid developers

[e-letter]

>On 12 May 2011 17:55, Marc Paré  wrote:
>
>> Le 2011-05-11 17:01, Samuel M a écrit :
>>
>>  I believe, that The Document Foundation can employ Developers for
>>> LibreOffice. I believe the community is able to get the money for that on a
>>> monthly base.
>>>
>>> We saw that the community was able to rise 50.000€ in 8(!) days. It will
>>> be possible to get that money in a year for one full-time developer.
>>> These two examples show that this works even over a longer period of time
>>> (note that these projects are much smaller than LibreOffice):
>>> - Ardour (http://ardour.org): $4500 are raised every month to pay the
>>> main developer
>>> - Linux Mint (http://linuxmint.com): $5500 were raised in April to pay
>>> the main developer
>>>
>>>
>>> Despite from having full-time developers, for volunteer developers it
>>> would be nice to get money for fixing a specific bug / implementing a
>>> feature. Ardour has such a system where you can donate for a specific issue:
>>> http://ardour.org/bugbounty
>>> I think something like this would bring great benefit to LO, since users
>>> can show what they want to be fixed most and developers get some money for
>>> coding (or at their option donate it to TDF).
>>>
>>> To be honest, if we could convince most school districts in any country to
>> adopt the use of LibreOffice as their main suite, dropping MSO and
>> contributing a small percentage of their "per seat" cost savings, then we
>> could see some distrcits paying to have accessibility issues worked on or
>> some other aspect of LibreOffice that would be of interest to them.
>>
>
>In essence this was the idea behind setting up the INGOTs. Your idea is
>simpler *if* you can get agreement with large centralised bureaucracies.
>It's not easy, I have been trying for more than 10 years ;-)
>
>Schools in the UK make individual decisions about the resources they use. We
>had to make INGOT certification wider than just OOo/LO simply because most
>are entrenched in MSO. OTOH we know some have switched as a result of
>learning more about FOSS through the certification process.  If we can
>generate volume international take up, funding developers on the project
>would be easy.
>

Whilst certification seems a good strategy, what about parental power
being exerted upon schools? One would imagine that if parents
(espcialy of low income families) were aware of free software, they
would implore schools to follow suit.

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[tdf-discuss] mailing list content disappearance

[e-letter]

On 13/05/2011, discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org
 wrote:
> Topics (messages 6130 through 6131):
>
> [tdf-discuss] Re: Paid Developers
>   6130 - Ian Lynch 
>   6131 - ??? 
>
>
>

When can someone improve mailing list behaviour with web mail clients
like gmail??? Even for this e-mail digest, the reply function results
in deletion of the original message content, apart from the text shown
above. This means a text editor has to be used...:(

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[tdf-discuss] desktop integration

[Valentin]

Hello guys!

I tested today the latest LibreOffice builds (beta 5 of 3.4) and  I saw the
better desktop integration in the Ubuntu-Desktop (10.10). Good work!
But ... since years there is one thing, that I absolutely don't like. It's
this gradient on the "drop down"-Button:
http://www.pic-upload.de/view-9943211/gradient.png.html

It's possible to make look the button a bit more nicer? Keep up the good
work, thank you for all!

Valentin

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Re: [tdf-discuss] Re: Paid Developers

[Ian Lynch]

On 13 May 2011 13:49, Marc Paré  wrote:

> Hi Ian
>
> Le 2011-05-13 05:27, Ian Lynch a écrit :
>
> Thanks for the info on the INGOTs.
>
> Having served on committees in charge of software acquisition, both at
> local and provincial level, I find the greatest reluctance on adopting is
> simply "networking". While many of our school districts would like to move
> to LibreOffice, the vast majority rely on recommendations from their IT
> departments which are MS certified. In order to provide greater acceptance
> of our product we need to supply solid support from the point of view its
> "network-ability". IT departments need to know that LibreOffice will work on
> their network and if there are problems that help is readily available. If
> there is no such service then the cost/seat is irrelevant -- MS Office is
> then kept.
>

Snag is that to provide such support requires manpower we don't have. A
self-support network run by the schools themselves would be a possibility.
Another issue is all the various different possible policies and set ups of
individual networks. It's one reason why cloud computing makes a lot of
sense for schools.

So, in my mind, we (the LibreOffice membership) should establish efficient
> "national" network help support. That is to say, for example, in my case, IT
> departments would have support help from LibreOffice.ca.


Have you the resources to sustain this?


> There should also be "for profit" support available locally should IT
> departments prefer to acquire this support.
>

Again is there a market that can support it? Here in the UK I doubt there is
just on Office software. Possibly we are getting to the point where there
might be in FOSS more generally. One of the reasons I set up INGOTs was that
we had a company installing infrastructure and maintenance including some of
the first Linux thin clients back nearly 10 years ago. It was a very
difficult business to make financially viable.

We could easily promote both support models on a national scale if we were
> to have enough national developers attracted to our project alongside a
> certification programme. Perhaps to start off, we could offer free
> certification for dev's interested in the networking programming area of
> LibreOffice ... just to "seed" such a programme.
>

I'd be willing to help with that, but the amount we could do would be
restricted by lack of resources for our mainstream development.


> As a side note -- Dev's interested in the "networking", "connectivity" of
> LibreOffice would also need access to a network "lab" of computers to
> expand/trouble-shoot network related issues. LibreOffice could maybe
> establish regional headquarters where it would fund labs where devs could
> physically work on networking issues. Research and development funds could
> be raised with this purpose in mind.
> 


All of this takes resources so its a bit of a Catch 22.

Cheers
>
> Marc
>
>
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>


-- 
Ian

Ofqual Accredited IT Qualifications
The Schools ITQ

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RE: [tdf-discuss] German Foreign Office is dropping only open sourcesoftware policy

[Pieter E. Zanstra]

> -Original Message-
> From: Olav Dahlum [mailto:odah...@gmail.com] 
> Sent: Friday, May 13, 2011 9:25 PM
> 
> So I think this cooks down to mismanagement above everything else...
> 
> -Olav

For the average office clerk it is a nightmare to change from one office
package to an other. Certainly if neither one is considerably better than
the other. And above all the file formats do not fit perfectly. 
For organisations it is a blessing that their employees happily purchase
software and train themselves in their own free time.
The open source community is too dispersed to show a single face to the
world, with possibly Linux as only relevant exception.

This move of the German Foreign Office can not have come as a surprise. How
much I regret them moving away, I do not think this is mismanagent on their
side. The only thing you can blame them for is that it has taken them so
long.
Pieter


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Re: [tdf-discuss] German Foreign Office is dropping only open source software policy

[Volker Merschmann]

Hi,

2011/5/13 plino :
> http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/227849/open_source_advocates_angry_at_german_govt_decision.html
>
> This isn't even about OpenOffice vs LibreOffice... It's about Closed Source
> vs Open Source
>
> TBH I think it was a bad move to change radically if you have experienced
> and productive users trained on whatever program (regardless of the
> license).
>
> Also, if you need professional support you can't just move to Open Source,
> let alone a Linux distro that was still being developed...
>
> Could it be that it took them 6 years to realize that?
>
There were much articles about this in the german press these days and
the government has to answer some questions which had been asked from
the opposition in parliament.
The main problem was that the OpenSource strategy was half-hearted as
the end-user had to work with dual-boot systems, some applications on
Windows, some on Linux. Also the guidance was poor and the apps did
not get updated for years. So the endusers in the diplomatic services
got displeased more and more, but the responsible persons in the
administration choose the wrong way out.
This is the short version, you can read a bit more at the H :
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/German-Foreign-Office-explains-open-source-elimination-1241804.html

Bye

Volker

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http://documentfoundation.org

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Re: [tdf-discuss] German Foreign Office is dropping only open source software policy

[Olav Dahlum]

On 13/05/11 20:02, plino wrote:
> http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/227849/open_source_advocates_angry_at_german_govt_decision.html
> 
> This isn't even about OpenOffice vs LibreOffice... It's about Closed Source
> vs Open Source
> 
> TBH I think it was a bad move to change radically if you have experienced
> and productive users trained on whatever program (regardless of the
> license). 
> 
> Also, if you need professional support you can't just move to Open Source,
> let alone a Linux distro that was still being developed...
> 
> Could it be that it took them 6 years to realize that?
> 
> --
> View this message in context: 
> http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/German-Foreign-Office-is-dropping-only-open-source-software-policy-tp2935716p2935716.html
> Sent from the Discuss mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
> 

A bit offtopic of course, but what a waste! Suse have been there all the
time and I'm pretty sure Redhat have a regional office serving Germany.
So I think this cooks down to mismanagement above everything else...

-Olav

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[tdf-discuss] Question

[Marius Popa]

Good evening! My name is Marius Popa, a user running both the latest stable
version and the latest beta version of LibreOffice, and I want to know what
should I do to digitally sign a document? Thanks in advance and I am looking
forward for your message.

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[tdf-discuss] German Foreign Office is dropping only open source software policy

[plino]

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/227849/open_source_advocates_angry_at_german_govt_decision.html

This isn't even about OpenOffice vs LibreOffice... It's about Closed Source
vs Open Source

TBH I think it was a bad move to change radically if you have experienced
and productive users trained on whatever program (regardless of the
license). 

Also, if you need professional support you can't just move to Open Source,
let alone a Linux distro that was still being developed...

Could it be that it took them 6 years to realize that?

--
View this message in context: 
http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/German-Foreign-Office-is-dropping-only-open-source-software-policy-tp2935716p2935716.html
Sent from the Discuss mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

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[tdf-discuss] Re: Paid Developers

[Marc Paré]

Hi Ian

Le 2011-05-13 05:27, Ian Lynch a écrit :

Thanks for the info on the INGOTs.

Having served on committees in charge of software acquisition, both at 
local and provincial level, I find the greatest reluctance on adopting 
is simply "networking". While many of our school districts would like to 
move to LibreOffice, the vast majority rely on recommendations from 
their IT departments which are MS certified. In order to provide greater 
acceptance of our product we need to supply solid support from the point 
of view its "network-ability". IT departments need to know that 
LibreOffice will work on their network and if there are problems that 
help is readily available. If there is no such service then the 
cost/seat is irrelevant -- MS Office is then kept.


So, in my mind, we (the LibreOffice membership) should establish 
efficient "national" network help support. That is to say, for example, 
in my case, IT departments would have support help from LibreOffice.ca. 
There should also be "for profit" support available locally should IT 
departments prefer to acquire this support.


We could easily promote both support models on a national scale if we 
were to have enough national developers attracted to our project 
alongside a certification programme. Perhaps to start off, we could 
offer free certification for dev's interested in the networking 
programming area of LibreOffice ... just to "seed" such a programme.



As a side note -- Dev's interested in the "networking", "connectivity" 
of LibreOffice would also need access to a network "lab" of computers to 
expand/trouble-shoot network related issues. LibreOffice could maybe 
establish regional headquarters where it would fund labs where devs 
could physically work on networking issues. Research and development 
funds could be raised with this purpose in mind.



Cheers

Marc


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Re: [tdf-discuss] Re: Paid Developers

[Ian Lynch]

On 12 May 2011 17:55, Marc Paré  wrote:

> Le 2011-05-11 17:01, Samuel M a écrit :
>
>  I believe, that The Document Foundation can employ Developers for
>> LibreOffice. I believe the community is able to get the money for that on a
>> monthly base.
>>
>> We saw that the community was able to rise 50.000€ in 8(!) days. It will
>> be possible to get that money in a year for one full-time developer.
>> These two examples show that this works even over a longer period of time
>> (note that these projects are much smaller than LibreOffice):
>> - Ardour (http://ardour.org): $4500 are raised every month to pay the
>> main developer
>> - Linux Mint (http://linuxmint.com): $5500 were raised in April to pay
>> the main developer
>>
>>
>> Despite from having full-time developers, for volunteer developers it
>> would be nice to get money for fixing a specific bug / implementing a
>> feature. Ardour has such a system where you can donate for a specific issue:
>> http://ardour.org/bugbounty
>> I think something like this would bring great benefit to LO, since users
>> can show what they want to be fixed most and developers get some money for
>> coding (or at their option donate it to TDF).
>>
>> To be honest, if we could convince most school districts in any country to
> adopt the use of LibreOffice as their main suite, dropping MSO and
> contributing a small percentage of their "per seat" cost savings, then we
> could see some distrcits paying to have accessibility issues worked on or
> some other aspect of LibreOffice that would be of interest to them.
>

In essence this was the idea behind setting up the INGOTs. Your idea is
simpler *if* you can get agreement with large centralised bureaucracies.
It's not easy, I have been trying for more than 10 years ;-)

Schools in the UK make individual decisions about the resources they use. We
had to make INGOT certification wider than just OOo/LO simply because most
are entrenched in MSO. OTOH we know some have switched as a result of
learning more about FOSS through the certification process.  If we can
generate volume international take up, funding developers on the project
would be easy.


For anyone not familiar here is the essence of what we do.

We provide certification for IT User skills accredited by the UK government
and linked to the EU qualifications framework. We have two EU transfer of
innovation grants to support take up in other countries with other grant
applications made this year. We have said that if say a Writer certificate
is gained with LO we can make that a LO certificate and give TDF a kick back
for each certificate. That means we don't need to ask for what are either
license fees or charitable donations from LO users, (well no harm in getting
donations anyway if we can) we ask them to get their skills certified -
something which most education people can identify with. Sell them education
not technology. Of course the difficult side is to get the schools to take
up LO and establishing the quality assurance systems for a credible
international certification in new territory. At present we have to
certificate other things because there simply isn't the volume of people
using FOSS in schools to sustain the business. This is beginning to change
though.

We are adding a lot of value by providing an e-portfolio/VLE system and
pupil progress tracking and reporting through custom Drupal modules. Videos
here  if interested. Many
other educational suppliers charge a lot for these facilities using
proprietary apps but without the certification, we are providing that
support as simple value added using FOSS.  We now have the facilities to
certify every subject in every level of the school curriculum (based on the
UK National Curriculum but in principle we could do the same with any
national system that is standards based) and include learners with Special
Educational Needs. Since most of this development work is done we can charge
low rates for users. In volume say a couple of dollars a certificate, its
designed to scale and we support multiple languages. There are about 7
million learners in the UK schools alone and we currently have active
project presence in Malaysia, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Germany, Spain,
Romania, Netherlands, Kenya, and USA with interest in a few others. It is
all embryonic but we do get an income so some at least are prepared to pay.
Not a big enough volume yet so we use the EU grants to support development.
We have more recently had interest from two or three large players in the
qualifications market - any one of these would make a very significant
difference simply acting as a marketing vector. We just keep on developing
until it is just a "no-brainer".


> So, yes, there are certainly some models that could be followed in fund
> raising that could prove advantageous to the LibreOffice project and users.
>

Sensible thing is to do the easy things first like getting donations
targeted on a