Re: [tdf-discuss] Re: Paid Developers

On 13 May 2011 13:49, Marc Paré <marc@marcpare.com> 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

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