LibreOffice / The Document Foundation needs €50,000. Please donate.
challenge.documentfoundation.org
challenge.documentfoundation.org
In addition, the German model provides a high security and stability, as the foundation's statutes cannot be changed and, therefore, cannot be abused. Setting up a corporation or an association, on the other hand, would expose us to the risk that, if a majority of all stakeholders so decided, the statutes could be changed, even as far as removing charitable purposes. In order to provide safety and stability, not only for our users, adopters, developers and enterprises, but for the whole community, a German-based foundation is ideal.
In addition, we have many active community members in Germany: the roots of the product originally lie here, we expect a lot of support from corporations and governmental bodies, and the adoption rate for free office productivity software is very high.
# a foundation is fully legal person # the foundation has no members # therefore nobody can decide to change the foundations mission afterwards (f.e. no shifting of mission values or other priorities possible) # the 50.000 € is a recommendation, yes. part of the reason: only dividends and interest must be used to finance the foundations activities. the 50.000 must stay untouched forever. 50.000 € * 0,03 (average interest rate) = 1.500 € per year available for expenses # again: the foundation is a cemented full legal entity which can hold copyright owner rights
This also has some unpleasant implications. Imagine if a large portion of credible forks popped up on HN asking for money before they had a few versions shipped. It would be a mess.
It would be great if we could have an argument about which of several credible OpenOffice fork organizations we could support. However, this search pretty much just turns up LibreOffice:
http://www.google.com/search?q=openoffice+fork
If they're gaming the system by finding a significant gap in the market, so be it.
(By the way, I just downloaded and installed LibreOffice and it works great, and there's no Oracle baggage. That counts for something!)
People will pay without doubt $600 for a commercial product like Office but have a lot of problems to contribute with someone making software for him for free.
We don't value what is cheap, like a woman that plays "hard to get", we value most what is expensive. When people pirate Photoshop they fell the value of their software is at least $1000 because it cost that much, while the effort deployed in GIMP, Inkscape or Blender seems worthless.
Those software products feel "almost there" but needs a lot of work for being useful for a professional. These projects need real money for having people working on them full time, not as hobbies like fontforge with his horrible UI because the author does not care, just a hobby.
Note to LibreOffice guys: When people read EUR 50,000 they think "Those greedy bastards want so much money from my pocket". Geeks or normal people seems to ignore a lot about business, that it takes MILLIONS of dollars to make a successful software product like Firefox, Android, Blender, Wikipedia, Photoshop, FinalCut or AutoCAD. It took BILLIONS to made Office, Windows or Linux.
So ask for small contributions and put a bar progress like wikipedia(people love them) and write down the reasons people or companies paying you $20 is good business for them. That you are more than 25 people working for them because if you don't tell people don't know it.
If you were a company that asked $100 per seat, you will need just 500 seats to get this money, MILLIONS of companies in the world need an Office suite so don't be shy, ask for millions of dollars-euros like firefox did(And you will get it because there is a need for it).
Additionally, corporations (which is where most of the money is in software) can't donate money. They have no problems paying $600 for a copy of MS Word (meh, it's deductible), but the managers/accountants would pitch a fit if you donated $6 of corporate money to whatever the currently popular OSS knockoff of Word is.
The "free as in beer" argument doesn't work when you're asking for money, and while I think "free as in freedom" is nice, if I'm going to donate money there are other causes that come first for me.
That said, this particular group of folks might not have had a significant hand in developing that decent competitor. I don't know enough about it to know if they're the people I should be donating to. Forks are complicated that way. I'm a little suspicious of them needing 50k right off the bat like this, but it's been a long time since I've followed development or the people involved very closely. It's such a huge project, it probably does need a reasonably large and funded organization to really push it forward, and I obviously wouldn't trust Oracle to do it.
We are, however, probably reaching the end of life for desktop-based office suites. I use Google docs for writing everything except books at this point, and I've considered trying it for a collaborative book, as well. Likewise spreadsheets...I haven't made a spreadsheet in OpenOffice in a couple of years. The free software fanatic in me worries about this move to a platform I have no control over, but the convenience and power of online editing is hard to beat.
These days, as I mentioned, I use Google docs for most stuff, and that's dramatically less capable than either MS Office or OpenOffice. I simply don't need millions of features to get the work done.
I think the relevance of desktop office suites is fading rapidly, and with it the need for Office or OpenOffice. (Though I do wonder if I could write a book for publication at this point in Google Docs and have editors/publishers be happy with that decision.)
Any OO.o or LO dev should grab the trial and figure out what's improved in it so they understand what they're up against.
ETA: http://i.imgur.com/63zCP.jpg
Formatting options (things like text styles and lists) pop up when you select something formattable.
Granted, this is because I've never been much of an Office user. But over the years I came to know where pretty much all the features were in the "classic" Office menus. When MS threw that out and put in a radically different UI, I decided that my minimal word processing needs did not justify the pain of re-learning the app.
And, perplexingly, MS listened.
You can add and remove things on the ribbon in the same way you do with the toolbar configurator in Firefox.
One could make the argument that they were before the interface overhaul, but it changed my view on Office completely.
It's just really nice to use. If OO.o could find some way to clone Office's interface without legal trouble, I'd go back in an instant.
But, the new file formats changed that.
And with Office 2007, MS rethought the whole UI and made features increadibly discoverabke and visceral. It honestly is a joy to use--and on the Mac, too!
To me, the Ribbon UI represents the next step in desktop UI: No menu bar, easy discoverability of features, direct feedback on most actions, very few breakout windows. OOo feels antique and clunky by comparison. So much so in fact, that I generally prefer to use Google Docs over OOo, just because it looks cleaner. By the way, have a look at [The Story of the Ribbon](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/2008/03/12/the-story...), a brilliant talk about how the new Office UI came into being.
But the final nail in OOo's coffin are the templates. Seriously, both Apple Pages and MS Word provide very nice-looking, professional templates that make it hard to make a document look terrible. In contrast, OOo has very basic tmplates that are guaranteed to look boring unless you change them.
Libre Office may be a chance to get these things straight. Start with good, professional templates, then overhaul the UI to something more practical. By all means, take inspiration from MS Office and Apple iWork. If they manage this, at least to some degree, this can be a winner. And I will donate money for that cause right now. But my hopes are small...
What I would like to see is someone formulate a plan for a series of small and/or more modular tools that could be used instead for office purpose instead of a massive office suite.
Open source seems doom to lose in a race to create Microsoft-style monster applications. And this isn't to deny the usefulness of MS Office or Open Office.
But an approach that could play to the strengths of Open Source would be needed if you want to win.
Creating a good browser is possible if not easy because the browser is modestly well-defined application.
Inkscape is the best open source GUI app I know of. Indeed it's app that isn't bad. As far as I can tell, a factor that let's it be good is that it's objective and domain are really well defined.
It would be nice to see people focus Open Development modular tools with a standard, well-defined domain. Those are the apps that the most enjoyable to program too.