libresociety/discuss/libresociety-2.txt

On 22/01/10 06:56PM, Paul Sutton via libreplanet-discuss wrote:
> Hi Andrew
> 
> Firstly, thank you for your well researched and referenced e-mail.  I can't
> answer all these, I can try and answer some points.

Wasn't well-researched lol, I wrote it down with pencil and paper late
at night.

> > "Why aren't we doing a great job convincing users to switch to
> > free software as a replacement to the proprietary software they use?"
>
> In terms of using for example MS office over Libreoffice,  I am running a
> STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Maths) event at my local library,
> the person who I am running this with likes MS office because she says it is
> better, has better features, looks more professional etc, this is because it
> has millions of dollars invested in it.
>
> I use libreoffice because as it runs on Debian and I am not prepared to pay
> £100's for a office package when I can get one, that while not a programmer
> i can at least contact developers and report problems. LibreOffice would be
> perfectly usable for a small business.

Funding has always been an issue with free software.  If people can get
it for gratis, non only the people who can't afford paying (which
includes a student like me, sadly) won't pay, the others who can afford
it are just too lazy to donate.  It's probably worse in China: donations
aren't in the culture.

> Another issue is that many businesses use MS office, therefore training is
> provided by colleges etc in MS office,  the result is you haver a trained
> workforce that can use what a business uses and therefore demands. If a
> business wanted to switch to libreoffice the software may be free but the
> cost of actually moving over may not be.

Yeah.  OnlyOffice is a project that mimics the look and feel of
Microsoft Office, has online collaboration through a document server
with optional Nextcloud support.

> People also rely now the fact office 365 is more web / cloud integrated.
> LibreOffice can be linked to Nextcloud, but it is not natively integrated.
> I think there is https://www.collaboraoffice.com/ this has integrations, but
> LibreOffice is not listed by the looks of it.

CollaboraOffice has something to do with LibreOffice, I remember.

I can't say much about office suites because I don't use them, not even
the free ones because I use Groff and TeX.

> So you need to factor this in, people can login to their MS account from
> anywhere and just keep working, like you can do with Cryptpad or overleaf
> etc.
 
I actually use Git for collaboration in editing, seems more robust than
any other alternative to me.  For home use, I put up a FreeBSD ZFS NFS
with three 8 TB disks (never gonna use that much), but I do suspect
normal users won't be able to do so.

> The modern world is more mobile, we are not sitting at the same desk every
> day using the same computer,   we may use laptop, tablets, phones etc to do
> our work,  we can leave our desk,  grab a coffee in the work canteen and
> keep working,  we can attend meetings in person / remotely and everything is
> just designed to work.
> 
> Offerings for devices such as the various open source phones appears to be,
> for me, confusing,
> 
> https://joinmastodon.org/apps
>
> So from that, can I buy a pinephone and run a mastodon client on it, ? Add
> to this, there is fairphone and a host of other free software operating
> systems, some are based on Android others not.  Only 1 app for something
> called sailfishOS.

No idea with phones, I generally don't use them unless if it's school
stuff.

I have multiple computers that I use, the main one is my Raspberry Pi
(surprise), decent enough in performance for me to hook it up to a 4K
screen and a decent Ergodox to use.  Emacs is slightly sluggish, but I
use Vim on slower computers so no worries for me.  I add, commit and
push to my main repo for everything I'm working on (even for school
essays, teachers want PDFs or TXT so I typeset them in XeLaTeX, the
source is plain text so I can git them well).  It's really easy to set
up a script to do that automatically on the close_write event of a file
(inotifywait -e close_write file.tex && git-cycle), but I do know normal
users can't do that.  There should be commit-listener GUI apps out
there.

> I think your classmates make a good point,  they need certain applications,
> and therefore are tied in to the non free software / devices they have.
> 
> We need to break that cycle,  perhaps one way is to take people who are
> already using free software and use their examples of how it is used in the
> real world how a business or school can run on free software.

Sadly that's rare.

> BTW are you in China or the US?

Shanghai, China.

Sincerely,
Andrew

:P