Open Life

Three years in a row now, the German OpenOffice.org chapter again made it to represent the project at the CeBIT trade fair in Hannover, Germany. This year, they are sharing the booth with OpenOffice.org supporters and services providers: we from Sun present StarOffice and our slick x86 Solaris on a dual-core Opteron (and, of course, the Sun weblog extension for OOo), standing in line with the heroic OOo volunteers to answer helpdesk questions from the hundreds of visitors.

Apart from that, lots of fruitful discussions, ideas, bug hunting, and, of course, partying is going on here.

Thanks to Jacqueline, Thomas, Joost, Florian, Georg, Andreas, Karsten, Markus, Andre et al. - here's a mugshot of the merry OOo crowd, in our "conference lounge":

Dell put a new concept that as shoking as it might seem, the revolutionary concept was to ask their costumerss what computer they would want. So the suggestion box is open and many people spoke. Pre-installing open source such as Linux and OpenOffice.org on their box.

Well, the OOo community has taken their word worth and started moving with an open letter to ask Dell that OpenOffice.org is ready for them. Having OpenOffice.org pre-installed on all their machines with Linux or Windows. OpenOffice.org runs on Vista, XP, Linux, OSX, and other operating systems such as Solaris. In the end Dell might have more tought on justifiying why this free, open source office suite solution is not available on their desktops and laptops that their costumers are asking for and also providing a value added proposition in the market.

Michael S.Dell, Chairman and CEO
Dell Computer Corporation
One Dell Way
Round Rock, Texas 78682

Dear Michael

Dell Computer Corporation has become one of Fortune's “America’s Most
Admired Companies” by providing great value, high quality computers and
peripherals, but most of all, by listening to your customers. Your
recent “IdeaStorm” initiative is the latest example of this. Here at
OpenOffice.org, we were delighted to see that the second most requested
feature by Dell customers was to have our office software pre-installed
on Dell systems. This request attracted more than 25,000 votes in two
days.

We believe that OpenOffice.org 2 software perfectly matches Dell’s
values. OpenOffice.org 2 is high quality office software, the result of
over twenty years’ continuous software engineering. It runs under all
common operating systems. It offers everything users expect from office
software, plus some bonus features that may pleasantly surprise them.
It’s easy for customers to use, with a familiar look and feel, and can
read and write a wide range of file formats, including Microsoft’s. On
top of all this, being licenced under open-source terms, it represents
outstanding value for money for you and your customers.

Let’s have a conversation about how we could build an “OpenOffice.org
supplied by Dell” product to give your customers what they are asking
for. We’d also be happy to accept any financial contribution that Dell
might offer to help ensure that OpenOffice.org continues to evolve in
the future.

Sincerely

John McCreesh
Marketing Project Lead
OpenOffice.org

Listening to the killer innovation podcast (http://www.techtrend.com/blog/) I found a fundamental flaw or a tremendous opportunity to innovate. Basically FLOSS is all about choice, we say that to heart, you have access to the source code which provide you with the ownership no other proprietary entity gives you and you have the value of freedom.

However I think this message is not correctly delivered to the public. Why? Because the public, being end users or corporations, don't really understand what you are saying. Yes, what came out of your mouth is easy to understand, but the 'how exactly does that works' is not.

I think FLOSS needs to innovate in this concept allowing end users, companies to easily capitalize that value of accessing/modifiying. A middle layers that talk between the core developer of the project, and the needs of the companies.

You can say consultants do that part, but really, consultants are like ants, you can't pin point a single one and they all too small to support a bigger structure or an easier structure.

You can argue IBM is a big ant, but their segment is way on the top of many end users and SMB. If IBM went cheap as in taking $1000-$500 services to do exactly that, modifiying the way your software works, I guess it will be a different picture to the end user.

Of course IBM here being the variable, what about other new companies that want to target exactly that segment. That can say, I will make your OpenOffice.org fly and give 3 spins and come back for $300 or $3000 dls. Or simply just, sit down and look what changes are actually worth to your company and implement them.

To do that I think there are some fundamental aspects of FLOSS that need to evolve, one answer is CVS, 80% of the FLOSS projects run on an old technology called CVS while is mainstream and widely used, is also a model that might be limiting the way FLOSS interact with the general public/consultants.

Wikipedia is an example of a layer that end users and smb can afford to implemente, modify and optimize without much cost for them. Even if Wikipedia started chargin $1 buck per edit, is affordable for any company and end user.

If Wikipedia was teh way to go for end users so that their thoughts can be transformed into working code on their structure, it will really prompt the promise of Freedom and will make sense of owning code.

Unfortunately the answer is not easy but acknowleding this fact is a great step to put down the values of hacking, freedom, ownership, innovation.

As a member and leader of the OpenOffice.org community I can assure you that OOo inspire people, people are always commenting:
- I want a OOo Project Management
- I want a Outlook-like for OOo
- I need this bug corrected
- We want a weboffice
- I want a Palm version of OOo

This comments definetly have 2 things:
- 1 they use our product and valued it
- They are inspired to keep using it and expand to other areas

It would be interesting to see if we can float those thoughts and raise funds for the development of it such as make a stock flotation on 'creating a OOo Outlook'. People buy an IPO of $5 bucks per stock and then a 2nd offering at 50, another at 500 and so on. You end up with $100,000 which will pay 5 developers to work on the Outlook module connecting to the OpenOffice.org suite.

That sounds great, however at this moment there are not enough people hacking in the UNO project which means that the public knowledge of the OOo API so the cost might be larger than simply hacking on top of the API but also learning the API which can get up to 100,000 alone to learn it and become good at it.

Same thing goes for GTK, Mono, Qt, XUL and other frameworks out there. However that's beyond the original point but this flotation might give that method to vote with their wallets, and the community raise fund to hire developer houses.