Get Legal - but not too soon [LWN.net]

The OpenOffice.org marketing team, sensing an opportunity in the latest round of Business Software Alliance attacks on companies using "pirated" software, has announced the "Get Legal - Get OpenOffice.org" campaign. It features a cute logo (seen on the right) and a web page discussing the difficulties in remaining in compliance with proprietary software licenses. OpenOffice.org, of course, offers a way out: switch to free software, make no license payments, and be entirely in compliance with the law.

The heavy-handed techniques employed by groups like the BSA have always been destined to play into the hand of free software advocates. Even companies with strict "a license for every copy" policies (and strict enforcement to back those policies up) can find themselves with unlicensed copies of software on their machines. The BSA, with its rewards for employees who turn in their companies and its police raids, can make the cost of those unlicensed copies very high. And, even if a company is able to stay in complete compliance, it bears the costs of license tracking and software audits. So OpenOffice.org is right to capitalize on this behavior; free software does, indeed, offer a way to avoid the expensive hassles which can accompany proprietary code.

When LWN posted a pointer to this campaign on May 1, however, the OpenOffice.org marketing team was not amused. One participant exclaimed:

Jesus what an idiot. Makes you wonder if they're purposely trying to wreck the campaign before it takes off.... I'm CC'ing this message to lwn to see if someone can at least smack that poster for us.

Your ~~editor~~ idiot, feeling suitably smacked, withdrew the posting. It is certainly not LWN's wish to "wreck" the efforts of free software projects.

This episode raises an interesting question with regard to how free software projects deal with their user communities. The usual rule is "release early, release often"; the idea being that the opportunity to obtain input from a wider community should be taken at the earliest possible time. There is little to be gained by holding on to work which is intended to be released anyway.

That ethic appears to be changing in some places, however. Companies perform free software work behind closed doors and release the result in one big pile with the obligatory press release. Releasing code earlier, it is said, is just an invitation to "bike sheds" and "stop energy," and an impediment to actually getting the work done. And marketing campaigns are, it would seem, so fragile that any visibility in the wider community threatens to "wreck" them. So work must be withheld until it is finished, ready to present itself in its final form.

It is worth asking whether press releases are really the best way for free software projects to interact with the rest of the world. A press release is fine as a way of gaining the attention of the mainstream media, but there is little in our community which needs to be kept secret until the PR has been officially distributed. It is hard to imagine that the strong message behind the "Get Legal" campaign can truly be compromised if the community knows, before the press release hits the net, that such a campaign is being developed. In fact, it's even possible that people outside of the core marketing group could have useful input which could make the campaign stronger.

The value in the free software process is not just in the delivery of something cool on a date picked by somebody in the marketing department - it's in the process. Without the process, all you have is another corporate product, albeit with less restrictive conditions and a nicer price tag. At times, we may all be tempted by the idea of dispensing with an open development process (and the community which goes with it) in the name of faster development or a splashier release. But going that way has its costs, and risks taking us closer to the proprietary systems that we have worked so hard to replace.

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Not wanting people to visit their site?

Posted May 4, 2006 3:56 UTC (Thu) by djfoobarmatt (subscriber, #6446) [Link]

It was probably indexed by google within minutes of being put on the server. If it's a big secret then don't publish it on the web you dodos.

Matt

Not wanting people to visit their site?

Posted May 4, 2006 10:23 UTC (Thu) by liljencrantz (guest, #28458) [Link]

Agreed. It would seem Daniel Carrera has been tuttled.

"tuttled" ???

Posted May 4, 2006 14:20 UTC (Thu) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link]

Surely you refer to http://wwwf.centos.org/127_story.html?storyid=127 when you say "tuttled", do you not?

I truly admire your neologism!

We are all idiots

Posted May 4, 2006 4:13 UTC (Thu) by mikov (subscriber, #33179) [Link]

If our editor is an idiot, I am proud to be called an idiot too :-)

To put some subtstance in my post: Just yesterday I was again bitten by slight incompatibilities between OpenOffice and MSOffice. I was working on a module exporting data to an Excel spreadsheet (using Andy Khan's JExcelAPI) and I just couldn't get formatting of currency values to work well. Since I develop in Linux, I was naturally testing with OpenOffice. It didn't occur to me that it was an OpenOffice problem, but when when I accidentally opened the exported file with MSExcel, it looked exactly as it should.

It was a relatively minor annoyance, but still I can't in clear conscience recommend to people to universally replace their MSOffice with OpenOffice yet.

A bitter realization hit me about a month ago when I was installing a software package on location - nobody, and I mean really nobody, not even the IT support staff, is using OpenOffice (or Firefox, or etc...) yet. I realized that my sense of proportion had been warped by reading too much LWN, Slashdot, etc - naturally most LWN readers are using Linux and OpenOffice, but that means nothing because that is precisely the reason we are LWN readers ...

We are all idiots

Posted May 4, 2006 6:20 UTC (Thu) by grouch (guest, #27289) [Link]

Many millions of downloads contradict that "nobody". Don't be depressed over one or even many locations populated by idiots. The software is in sufficiently wide-spread use to get attention.

We are all idiots

Posted May 4, 2006 6:59 UTC (Thu) by danielpf (subscriber, #4723) [Link]

I was pleased to see my daughter prefer using OO than MS Office
on the home computer because she had been trained with OO at school.
Every year a new generation of users (a few %) is coming on the
market with new habits.

We are all idiots

Posted May 5, 2006 17:18 UTC (Fri) by mikov (subscriber, #33179) [Link]

I hope you are right. Anyway, the people that I am refering to, who are not using OpenOffice or Firefox, are not "idiots" - they are simply very non-technical. There are many many offices populated with non-technical people - they use their office PCs to edit documents or spreadsheets and that's it. Many of them still have Win98 on non-upgradeable machines. Note that I am not talking about the accounting department in a high-tech company here, but about businesses having nothing to do with computers. Changing anything would be terrible for them - they don't want to be bothered with computer related stuff unless absolutely necessary. Actually, I don't blame them - I hate computers too :-)

So, what I am saying is, there are more of these people than we are (or at least I am) used to assuming because we tend to communicate with people like ourselves and tend to work in high-tech companies where even the HR departments are well educated in computers.

We are all idiots

Posted May 4, 2006 7:29 UTC (Thu) by MortFurd (guest, #9389) [Link]

Say what you will, but OO has saved the bacon of two of my colleagues this week.

Word mangled a document on save for one coworker. That latest version can be opened but not saved. I opened it in OO and resaved it as a Word doc. Now Word can read and save its own document again.

Another coworker had a thesis that he wrote several years ago. He needed to do something with it again (he's a teacher, continuing education stuff) and couldn't open it. It was named as a Word document (thesis.doc) but wouldn't open. I got out OO and gave it a try. OO said "Hey, this looks like a Word Perfect doc. Do you want open it that way?" Opened just fine, and saved as a real Word doc, and the guy is happy. He's also confused 'cause he doesn't know how it got to be a WP doc. Most likely he's just like every body else. If it is a text document then it must be Word.

Any way, OO is good software if you are into traditional word processors. I personally can't use Word or Word Perfect or even OO if I've got to create a long document with a lot of real info in it. I have to use LyX to get any real work done.

At any rate, I like the concept of the "Get Legal" campaign. It seems like a darned good argument to use. I also think the OO guys need to keep the campaign development on a private list and restrict access to the previews in the CMS until campaigns are ready.

We are all idiots

Posted May 4, 2006 11:09 UTC (Thu) by brwk (guest, #6849) [Link]

>At any rate, I like the concept of the "Get Legal" campaign. It seems like a
>darned good argument to use.

Absolutely.

>I also think the OO guys need to keep the campaign development on a private >list and restrict access to the previews in the CMS until campaigns are >ready.

There are other ways too - if they'd simply called the host:

fordiscussion.marketing.openoffice.org

I doubt there would have been any confusion or "unwanted pre-release" posting. Most people will "do the right thing" if you give them a few clues about what is going on - and a simple URL change would have made this obvious.

Regards, Bevis.

Currency formatting bug

Posted May 4, 2006 18:29 UTC (Thu) by dank (guest, #1865) [Link]

So, did you report the bug to the OpenOffice.org team?
The URL is
http://qa.openoffice.org/servlets/ProjectIssues

Currency formatting bug

Posted May 5, 2006 17:23 UTC (Fri) by mikov (subscriber, #33179) [Link]

You are right that I should. First I have to install and test with the latest update of OpenOffice, which tends to be a bit of a pain in Debian :-) I feel guilty using backports.org, because they don't seem to have any US mirrors - (btw, does anybody know why ?)

RE: We are all idiots

Posted May 11, 2006 18:48 UTC (Thu) by renox (subscriber, #23785) [Link]

About OOo, it's well known that the spreasheet part is less mature than Writer, this just has to be factored on your recommendation: much more people are writing documents than spreadsheets anyway.

Plus, the competition MSOffice is not exactly bugfree: IMHO it's a piece of junk, which tends far too often to corrupt documents, given the money they make on the product, Microsoft should be ashamed of it.. And contrary to the OS you can't blame the quality on buggy drivers (which can be the real cause of troubles), they're just lazy because they have a monopole.

What's new

Posted May 4, 2006 23:59 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Actually FSF warked this way for years - you only were able to see CVS of next version of emacs and/or gcc if you've signed papers. So... nothing actually new - it's just we are now expect different release tactic...

Get Legal - but not too soon

Posted May 11, 2006 7:11 UTC (Thu) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]

The problem with "release early, release often" is politics.

And it sounds like XGL is actually a typical Open Source product. Release 0.1 (the very first) *should* *be* a working product.

Everybody talks about "release early, release often", and that's what they see because that's what all visible projects do. What they MISS is that this mantra doesn't work for new projects, because if I try out a new project and it doesn't work, I probably won't come back. If I upgrade and something breaks, well that's par for the course.

"release early, release often" just DOESN'T WORK for new projects that are just starting out - and one only has to look at linux for an example - the very first release of that was a WORKING PRODUCT.

Cheers,
Wol