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#1

And who is this capital-C "Community" of which you speak? (I was teasing about founders.libreoffice.org, but not members.libreoffice.org.) What was done to engage all effected parties?

" It is a slight change for those writing to the lists, but we're trying to make the process as easy as possible."

But why is the change not made a slight change, if any, for those who are the beneficiaries of the change, rather than those who are not?

As I said, I don't expect this change to be altered, but I think some introspection about the values it reflects would be useful.

- Dennis

#2

Hello Dennis,

And who is this capital-C "Community" of which you speak? (I was teasing about founders.libreoffice.org, but not members.libreoffice.org.) What was done to engage all effected parties?

the Community is all of us, the people engaging on the lists, contributing. We received many requests like "can I have a @libreoffic.org address like it was at OpenOffice.org", and during one of the public calls, the steering committee agreed in doing so, help people identify with the project. The limitation to members -- anyone active can apply as a member -- is solely because of bad experiences we had at OpenOffice.org, where people simply could register an @openoffice.org address and pretend they speak on behalf of the project. We ran into problems indeed with that.

We discussed on the public lists and in the public calls -- it cannot be more public and transparent, anyone had a chance to join. In fact, the discussion has been running since February or even earlier, so there was plenty of time.

But why is the change not made a slight change, if any, for those who are the beneficiaries of the change, rather than those who are not?

Because it is technically not possible. We want to issue @libreoffice.org addresses, and by doing so, we cannot have mailing lists on the same addresses. I also proposed to instead use @libreoffice.net for the mail forwarders, but nobody agreed to that. This, again, on the public list where anyone could discuss.

And, honestly, it's no bigger change than if one contact of yours has a new e-mail address. You change it in the address book, and that's it.

Florian

#3

For me, the idea of
     @global.libreoffice.org --> world
     @us.libreoffice.org --> USA
     @canada.libreoffice.org --> Canada
can be useful in the lists and other regional work.

so
marketing@global.libreoffice.org would be the general marketing that is not keyed to one specific region.

marketing@us.libreoffice.org would be for the US region list, but it also includes Canadian interest as well - hopefully.

marketing@french.libreoffice.org could be for a French language marketing list - I do not know if this a list or not.

marketing@france.libreoffice.org for the country

marketing@canada.libreoffice.org

marketing@mexico.libreoffice.org

etc., etc., etc.

This is a good thing to have, thought you have to produce a lot of sub-domain work to get it all working correctly.
Then you will have to have people assigning sub-domain names to the groups that need those names, so a Brazilian group does not get all of South America, and a different group does not take over the sub-domain that the Brazilian group needs.

The NA community project included member from the US and Canada, but we hope to get some Mexican involvement.
So we could have the @north-america.libreoffice.org sub-domain, or some other one that states we are represent the North American region of the country.

Now who gets to have an email address off from the domain or sub-domain, I am not qualified to decide. For me, if they are not part of the steering committee or any other governing group, I do not think they should have one of the @libreoffice.org email addresses, or maybe even @sometext.libreoffice.org. But I am not a part of any governing group or committee for LibreOffice, so I do not have a say in this. There should be clear-cut rules on assigning email addresses, and hopefully there are some already in place.

I "bought" libreoffice-na.us as a domain to be a place for a DVD testing portal, and I could make as many email addresses as I want, or my host provider will allow. But I do not tell people I am the "voice of" LibreOffice, but I am part of the North American Community DVD Project that is promoting LibreOffice within our community. If you have email addresses off from the same domain as LibreOffice is located, like @libreoffice.org or documentfoundation.org, then you may have people thing these people represent the LibreOffice and will take their words as "fact". That is the problem with giving email addresses to "employees" using the company's domain name. There could always be people who should not have them.

#4

As has been stated, it would have been MUCH better to have simply made
these addresses be something like user@memers.libreoffice.org, rather
than disturbing the existing community...

This would have also made it clear that these people were simply
*members*, not actual *reps* of TDF or LibreOffice...

#5

Upside-down. Membership of TDF is governed by a set of agreed rules and can be
revoked. OOo didn't have that. With OOo the membership and the Community were
seriously under-valued as a low-level add-on to the company that owned the
product, ie cheap labour to do the grunt work. Some Sun employees may have
appreciated certain members of the community at certain times.

With TDF the membership 'is' (will be?) the 'company' that owns the product.
The founders are the core of that. Members are representative of at least a
small part of the organisation that owns the product (ie representing
themselves) so bad-behaviour back-fires on them. It's a completely different
bottle of crisps from the Sun and Oracle set-up.

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#6

Sorry to interrupt your admin wars.... Any chance that someone in the COMMUNITY (With or
without the capital "c") can solve why Impress loses all it's links (paths) to MP3 audio files
using "interact play sound"..... (in XP Pro environment as I can't stand the GUI for dummies
of WIN7).

May be trivial to you but put it this way.... us nasty MS Office Users (probably not paying
licence fees ref your forums comments) are having to revert to MS Office 2003 to get a
Powerpoint without the anal GUI of the current versions. BTW it doesn't lose links either.

I'm not sure what's worse the MS GUI or the fact that Libo boffins have no desire to improve
their product.

Quite obviously I can't use Impress for serious business so I guess my question is purely
academic?

Un-Impressed

#7

Hi,

Quite obviously I can't use Impress for serious business so I guess my question is purely
academic?

Good job you didn't post on the dev list then, you would've been told,
that as a serious business user, you would naturally consider buying a
serious support contract !!

Enterprise use case scenarios are considered by more than one developer
to be marginal use cases, unless you as a business user are prepared to
sponsor developer time or prioritising to get your pet bug/feature fixed.

Un-Impressed

Unperturbed. And yes I am a business user. Do I think it sucks - yes,
but then I did with MSO too.

Alex

#8

Hi :slight_smile:
Are there Support Contracts available for LibreOffice already? Any chance of a
link? I saw one of the tri-folds mentioned about support from Novell but i
thought Novel got bought-out a few months ago. Are they still around and if so
do they offer paid-for support?
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#9

Thanks Alex.... Appreciate your thoughts..

Does that mean I have to buy special support to correct bugs in a "released" version of LibO?

If then you might as well cut the hype about open system and charge licence fee's like MS....
at least then we might get an Impress that basically works.

Plse note that I was using a published feature of Impress not some weird functionality that I
would expect to pay for to resolve/develop.

It sucks.

#10

Hi :slight_smile:
Are there Support Contracts available for LibreOffice already? Any chance of a
link? I saw one of the tri-folds mentioned about support from Novell but i
thought Novel got bought-out a few months ago. Are they still around and if so
do they offer paid-for support?
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

They are still around, as far as I can tell.

I say late last month a link, and followed it to Novel and its support options.

Also, for legal stuff, if a company gets bought out the current owner must abide by the contracts made with the company they bought out. So any support contract must be kept going. Otherwise if a company wanted to break a contract, they would just be able to be bought out by a holding company and then break the contracts. This would become a big mess.

I have heard of several companies offering paid support services, but do not remember their names since I cannot afford to pay for support on my limited budget. A $150 printer is a large ticket item for me, so spending another $50 a month for support is not my idea of needed use of my limited income. For companies, that is another story.

#11

Thanks Alex.... Appreciate your thoughts..

Does that mean I have to buy special support to correct bugs in a "released" version of LibO?

No we just report them and our developers work on the corrections. Hopefully those fixes are made in time for the next release of LibreOffice.

The support idea may be like having a person walking you though usage and features of LibreOffice or help you install it on a new computer. This is the type of support a company's internal tech people do. They do not work on fixing bugs in MS Office, do they?

Actually LO version 3.4 is coming out soon. This packages has fixed a number of issues that users have reported. Do not ask me what they are, since I do not have the memory for such things.

EVERY release of LibreOffice is free. Reporting bugs is free. Getting support here is free.

If then you might as well cut the hype about open system and charge licence fee's like MS....
at least then we might get an Impress that basically works.
Plse note that I was using a published feature of Impress not some weird functionality that I
would expect to pay for to resolve/develop.

It sucks.

Well, with a detailed report on what it is not doing correctly, there may either be a "fix" made for the next release, or one could be started.

I remember that I use to have to use an extension for MSO to make PowerPoint be stand alone on a CD for use with a system that does not have PP.

What do you mean by the "publish feature"? Make it a PDF document or print it in a finished way? Publish it for a web based use online? There are so many ideas of "publishing" I do not know what you mean. Sorry, but that is a fact for me and maybe others.

#12

Hi,

Thanks Alex.... Appreciate your thoughts..

Does that mean I have to buy special support to correct bugs in a "released" version of LibO?

If then you might as well cut the hype about open system and charge licence fee's like MS....
at least then we might get an Impress that basically works.

Not as such, because some bugs will be fixed eventually whatever
happens, but :

- if you want "enterprise stability" in LibreOffice, the advice I have
been given and told to disseminate is to take out a support contract
with one of the more general enterprise support providers (Novell, Suse,
RedHat, Ubuntu ?, others ?) which are specifically offering LibreOffice
support ;

- taking out a support contract will help those companies, who currently
contribute code to the development of LibreOffice, to prioritise bug
fixing and feature development

- it makes no difference if the bug you have discovered was part of a
functionality already included in Impress or some weird behaviour that
you might have discovered from one version to the next - development and
releases will continue irrespective of such consideration ;

- even functionality that used to work in previous OOo versions, and no
longer works in LibO, will not necessarily receive priority treatment -
the major stopppers are bugs that cause crashes, and only then if they
are multiplatform, mulit-OS (with a slight preference for Linux and
Windows) and are perceived by the core developers as affecting many users.

I doubt that you will find any of the above written down _clearly_ in
any of the Foundation's, or LibreOffice.org's website pages, although
much of it is present in the various discussion lists (developer,
foundation, marketing). It is one of my major gripes with the project as
it currently stands that there is a lot of "hype" and very little down
to earth "in your face" explanation of a consensus of where the project
should be going. Perhaps that is just down to my personality of
requiring things to be as clear as possible up front so that at least I
can weigh up whether it is potentially worth investing more in the
project than I currently do (and I am already fairly heavily involved).

An example : can anyone point me to a webpage from the Foundation or the
LibreOffice.org site where it clearly states that LibreOffice is not
intended for business use or that if you are a business you should buy
support ?

FWIW, if you trawl around the net a bit, you can find enterprise support
vendors for LibreOffice :

http://www.credativ.co.uk/services/support/projects/office/libreoffice/
at 200 GBP / month
whether such a contract will actually get your bug problem fixed is
another matter...

http://www.lanedo.com/libreoffice.html
No publicly accessible pricing that I could see. They also offer to
actually fix bugs.

HTH,

Alex

#13

Excellent post, Alexander.

I agree that it is essential to have written rules of what to expect and
what not to expect from a project.

I totally disagree with LO's philosophy of "Even if we broke something we
might not fix it" but it is better to know that than for users to complain
and demand pointlessly.

And the advice for people to get support from LO supporting companies is
also an excellent point.

I think TDF should use your post to make things clear to everybody instead
of leaving it all in the "grey area"

Kudos!

#14

Hi :slight_smile:
Hopefully some of those issues will be discussed and agreed, perhaps even voted
on as the official membership grows. Hopefully issues will be up for further
discussions again when the membership is much larger again.

Support Contracts need to be available for very much less and hopefully will
be. A £200 GBP / month is reaching the realms of paying an in-house dev. Maybe
only about 6hours/month (including over-heads) but way beyond the reach of most
users.

Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#15

Hi Alex,

Re: Trivia

Much appreciate your open and transparent view. I like down to earth discussion. My (sad)
conclusion is that I have to back off LibO Impress and cannot seriously consider changing
from the shackles of MS. I also think maybe us Impress guinea-pig users are in the minority
and it's only Write & Calc that get the majority of attention.

I do not believe it's unreasonable to request accurate information of product issues and
scheduled fixes.

I think Libo should carry a health warning! Basically stating that you can use LibO at your own
peril and that business users do so entirely at their own risk. In particular LibO Office suite of
programs are not interchangeable with their MS counterpart and their functionality is not
guaranteed.

[rant mode on]

My specific point here is the function in Impress "Interaction - Play Sound"..... on the surface
this looks very similar to MS PP "play-sound" equivalent BUT (a) is completely different (b)
utterly fails if you attempt to convert Impress to Powerpoint and (b) Frequently loses all paths
(links) between icons on screen and associated audio files. (Any potential Impress users
beware!)

[rant mode off]

Had I seen such information prior to attempting to seriously use Impress I could have saved
myself much wasted time and effort. Not to mention the piss-poor quality of Impress "Help"
documentation.

I also think LibO for Linux and LibO for MS is a world apart.... Linux users are by nature are
more technically capable than your average MS Windows user (of which I am one - shouts of
speak for yourself...).... So if LibO is to ever meet the needs of the "mass market" of which
MS Office is the dominant platform you gotta give us lesser mortals a stable and well
documented product.

"Fatal Blue Screens" and years of MS abuse have taught us MS Office Users how to
seriously bitch. When MS wrecked the old interface to MS -Office by introducing their anal
GUI that's when I turned to Impress out of desperation, (not because it was free), and hoped
for some normality as I loved its User interface and much of it's functionality.

However as MS Users our hands are tied! If we use "alternative" programs they have to have
interchange compatibility or our business communication is threatened.

I'm now licking my wounds ("open sores" ?) and have reverted to PP 2003 to retain my
sanity.... what else can I do?

Impress - This Product can be hazardous to your health!

#16

Hi Alex,

I was just reflecting on the concept of having to pay for support to resolve my Impress
problem.... Such a venture could cost major bucks if it is a serious code issue.... indeed it
might not be fixable without the actual developers.

OK, Lets say I spend big money to get it fixed.... what happens to the solution which I've paid
for?

Do I get shares in LibO for providing funding?

If the bug was in an Application which I owned then it makes sense to invest but for a User to
invest money into a pit with no bottom it makes no commercial sense. My FD would have a
fit... he pays for MS licences but would never pay MS for Operating System support! His view
being if it's sold world wide as an operating system then it should "fit for purpose".

The above not being applicable to private Applications we may chose to develop.

Imagine paying MS to resolve the "Fatal Blue Screen"............... What?

Kind regards

"Un-Impressed"

#17

Hi
I think sticking with PowerPoint 2003 is smart. Hopefully Impress will catch up
and be able to do the things it claims to be able to do. Sadly and annoyingly
it's going to be a long while before that happens.
Regards from
Tom :slight_smile:

#18

In news:4DE21B26.1625.1040CB83@timi.iafrica.com,
timi@iafrica.com <timi@iafrica.com> typed:

Hi Alex,

I was just reflecting on the concept of having to pay for
support to resolve my Impress problem.... Such a venture
could cost major bucks if it is a serious code issue....
indeed it might not be fixable without the actual
developers.

OK, Lets say I spend big money to get it fixed.... what
happens to the solution which I've paid for?

Do I get shares in LibO for providing funding?

If the bug was in an Application which I owned then it
makes sense to invest but for a User to invest money into
a pit with no bottom it makes no commercial sense. My FD
would have a
fit... he pays for MS licences but would never pay MS for
Operating System support! His view being if it's sold
world wide as an operating system then it should "fit for
purpose".

The above not being applicable to private Applications we
may chose to develop.

Imagine paying MS to resolve the "Fatal Blue
Screen"............... What?

Kind regards

"Un-Impressed"

This is/was an interesting and useful thread for putting a lot of things
into context without a lot of angst or bitch-modes; congrats to all for the
competence shown throughout.

In my case, I find the occasional mentions of when some things will appear,
or relative time frames even, acceptable although a schedule that's adhered
to would be nice. OTOH though, many of the developers here also have
families and a "real" job that keep food on the table so I can easily excuse
the lax schedules. The vast majority of people responsible for the actual
underlying code and other functions appears by far to be volunteers, not
paid personnel and they have accomplished a fantastic amount of work in a
short time to get LO off the ground and functional for at least most people.
   As was mentioned, Writer and Calc are my two most used applications in LO
where I have much less use for Impress, the real subject of this part of the
thread.
  Most of the other applications in LO I simply learn from the ground up in
LO and make few comparisons to MS; it makes it easier to pick up on the
nuances for the most part. Base will be my next target and I'm lucky in that
my needs for Impress aren't great. What I create in Impress is for my own
personal use as presentations, etc. of MINE and not something where I must
pass the files on to another person or department, so if I get it working in
Impress, which I find fairly easy to use, that's as far as I have to go;
next step is in the meeting rooms of whomever the presentation is for. Thus
for me, I don't run into many of the problems discussed here.

IMO, LO is in pretty good shape and should improve considerably over the
next year or so. As for fixes that won't be fixed, I pray that's an
over/under statement because if I take it seriously and as was stated, it'd
be a huge disappointment unless there were at least workarounds or a
different way of gettng what the users needed, which will never be an
ignored bug. And I do understand that there wll be problems with available
resources, expertise and all kinds of thing but eventually every single
legitimate bug needs to be addressed.

Just my two cents, nothing more. I'm an avid user and I hope that folks like
"un-impressed" will check back now and then. The biggest thing I think is
missing is a straght-forward, bulleted list of bugs & problems for each
application within Lbre Office. I don't find the bug-tracking system to be
very good for such a purpose. Had this existed, perhaps "Un-Impressed"
wouldn't have posted that he had to leave Impress. At a minimum the list/s
could save a lot of people a lot of heartache by reading it before going
producton-mode for several days/weeks and then dscovering some important
function is buggy or missing as yet. I suspect such a list could be
generated from the bug-tracker as opposed tosomeone sitting down and
recreating the wheel.

Best Regards,

Twayne`

#19

Hi Alexander,

Alexander Thurgood wrote (29-05-11 09:58)

- if you want "enterprise stability" in LibreOffice, the advice I have
been given and told to disseminate is to take out a support contract
with one of the more general enterprise support providers (Novell, Suse,
RedHat, Ubuntu ?, others ?) which are specifically offering LibreOffice
support ;
[...]
An example : can anyone point me to a webpage from the Foundation or the
LibreOffice.org site where it clearly states that LibreOffice is not
intended for business use or that if you are a business you should buy
support ?

Well, some weeks (ago?) I've seen passing some discussion about this (not followed details).
But to me it looks as a misinterpretation.
- yes, support contracts are important, because also that generates revenues for the companies sponsoring developers of LibreOffice;
- no, a support contract will not in general guarantee 'enterprise stability', because... what ís 'enterprise stability'?

IMO the initial remark from Michael Meeks was to indicate that when you want to be rather sure (...) that specific fixes are done or features realized, you are welcome to do it yourself, have someone doing it (after all it is open source) or get a support contract that gives the right for fixing an amount of issues.
So if an enterprise relies on specific features, it can simpley wait for the moment that is happens ... but probably it is not the most logic choice.

Regards,
Cor

#20

Hi,

timi@iafrica.com wrote (27-05-11 19:27)

Any chance that someone in the COMMUNITY (With or
without the capital "c") can solve why Impress loses all it's links (paths) to MP3 audio files
using "interact play sound".....

Well, must be a bug. Already found by you, or someone else, in bugzilla?
Is it this one
   https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=36286
   (specific with save as ppt) ?

Anyway, here is a short lik to the query for Impress + link OR MP3 OR sound: http://bit.ly/ljp6Wc

Quite obviously I can't use Impress for serious business so I guess my question is purely
academic?

Well, if playing MP3 with your presentations is key to the work you are doing, then indeed that is a nasty problem.
Pls give some more information.

Thanks,
Cor