openoffice is dead?

[Christopher Browne]

On Sun, Mar 6, 2011 at 9:00 PM, William Park <opengeometry-FFYn/CNdgSA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 06, 2011 at 06:34:52PM -0500, phiscock-g851W1bGYuGnS0EtXVNi6w at public.gmane.org wrote:
>> On one occasion I was in the lineup at Canada Computers and noticed the
>> guy ahead of me was spending a Vast Fortune on Microsoft Office stuff. I
>> really had to bite my tongue not to advise him to try OO. The Canada
>> Computer people probably would have thrown me into the street.
>
> This goes to the heart of issue...
>    How do we get people to spend that kind of money on Linux
>    applications?

While I appreciate that you may think this important, I don't actually
care about that.  I don't care to require people to spend "that kind
of money" on Linux applications.

GTALUG doesn't have anything in its constitution about "encouraging
people to unleash bags of money on Linux."

To the contrary, the first object our Letters Patent indicates as a
purpose for incorporation is:

"To promote interest in, and the use of, Linux, the Free Software
Foundation, the GNU Public License, and related technologies and
solutions"

I believe that people are better off not sending Briefcases Full of
Money to Microsoft, but rather in using their money for whatever other
sorts of things they'd like to use their money on.

If you're trying to find ways to capture those Briefcases of Money,
that may be quite interesting to you, personally, but it's not
properly something that GTALUG is supposed to care about.

And I head back to my old canard that typical computer stores aren't
really about people that are into computing; they are primarily
*stores*, that draw in inventory, in the forms of boxes small and
large, and then, they sell those boxes.  They're not electronic
engineers - they couldn't build a CPU if their lives depended on it.
They just bring in boxes that contain things they think they can sell.

The computer stores that have survived have some modicum of expertise
at taking some of those boxes (containing motherboards, CPUs, disk
drives, cases), and assembling them into functioning computers.

In this context, software costs look a whole lot more like a head tax
than anything else.  We decided that head taxes were an evil thing
when applied to people; the same hasn't been recognized generally as a
truth for computers.  Richard Stallman "evangelizes" the notion of
proprietary software being an evil, but it's not nearly something that
people universally agree upon.

But if our Letters Patent indicate promoting interest in the FSF and
GPL, we are, formally, as an organization, somewhat expected to
appreciate that kind of argument.

And that has certainly gotten expressed in this thread, with people
considering saying "you didn't need to pay for all that expensive
proprietary software."  And looking back to organizational "first
principles," I find myself compelled to agree.  (Not that it took a
lot of arm-twisting!)

On the contrary side, I'm not sure how we'd see about twisting
peoples' arms to give us their Briefcases Full of Money without having
to head down proprietary roads inconsistent with our objectives.
-- 
http://linuxfinances.info/info/linuxdistributions.html
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