OpenOffice.org sends Dell a letter [LWN.net]

From:		John McCreesh <jpmcc-AT-openoffice.org>
To:		announce-AT-openoffice.org
Subject:		[ooo-announce] PR: OpenOffice.org issues an invitation to Dell Computer Corporation
Date:		Mon, 12 Mar 2007 07:11:15 +0000

OpenOffice.org urges Dell's CEO to respond to customer demand and bundle
OpenOffice.org's free software alternative to Microsoft Office with
Dell's computers.

In an open letter released today, the OpenOffice.org community invites
Michael Dell to work with them to pre-install OpenOffice.org 2 office
software on Dell computers. Dell's own IdeaStorm website has recorded an
overwhelming customer demand for this feature, currently showing over
70,000 requests for OpenOffice.org 2.

The OpenOffice.org community is the home of the leading free software
competitor to Microsoft's Office suite. The letter claims that
OpenOffice.org 2 software and Dell hardware make a perfect match,
sharing identical values of delivering high quality at unbeatable value.
A joint development by Dell and OpenOffice.org raises the prospect of an
"OpenOffice.org supplied by Dell" product, with finance from Dell
helping to built security for the open-source community.

Text of the letter:

+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+

Michael S.Dell, Chairman and CEO
Dell Computer Corporation
One Dell Way
Round Rock, Texas 78682

Dear Michael

Dell Computer Corporation has become one of Fortune's “America’s Most
Admired Companies” by providing great value, high quality computers and
peripherals, but most of all, by listening to your customers. Your
recent “IdeaStorm” initiative is the latest example of this. Here at
OpenOffice.org, we were delighted to see that the second most requested
feature by Dell customers was to have our office software pre-installed
on Dell systems. This request attracted more than 25,000 votes in two
days.

We believe that OpenOffice.org 2 software perfectly matches Dell’s
values. OpenOffice.org 2 is high quality office software, the result of
over twenty years’ continuous software engineering. It runs under all
common operating systems. It offers everything users expect from office
software, plus some bonus features that may pleasantly surprise them.
It’s easy for customers to use, with a familiar look and feel, and can
read and write a wide range of file formats, including Microsoft’s. On
top of all this, being licenced under open-source terms, it represents
outstanding value for money for you and your customers.

Let’s have a conversation about how we could build an “OpenOffice.org
supplied by Dell” product to give your customers what they are asking
for. We’d also be happy to accept any financial contribution that Dell
might offer to help ensure that OpenOffice.org continues to evolve in
the future.

Sincerely

John McCreesh
Marketing Project Lead
OpenOffice.org

+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+

About OpenOffice.org

The OpenOffice.org Community is an international team of volunteer and
sponsored contributors who develop, support, and promote the leading
open-source office productivity suite, OpenOffice.org®. OpenOffice.org's
leading edge software technology (UNO) is also available for developers,
systems integrators, etc to use in OpenOffice.org extensions or in their
own applications.

OpenOffice.org supports the Open Document Format for Office Applications
(OpenDocument) OASIS Standard (ISO/IEC 26300) as well as legacy industry
file formats and is available on major computing platforms and with
native language support in over 80 languages. OpenOffice.org software is
provided under the GNU Lesser General Public Licence (LGPL) and may be
used free of charge for any purpose, private or commercial.

The OpenOffice.org Community acknowledges generous sponsorship from a
number of companies, including Sun Microsystems, the founding sponsor
and primary contributor.

(Log in to post comments)

OpenOffice.org sends Dell a letter

Posted Mar 12, 2007 16:14 UTC (Mon) by branden (subscriber, #7029) [Link]

Or just use proper HTML character entities instead of inlining 8-bit characters...

Or maybe that doesn't work? Let's see... à la piñata...

It works, but you have to use HTML-formatted comments.

OpenOffice.org sends Dell a letter

Posted Mar 12, 2007 16:53 UTC (Mon) by sveinrn (subscriber, #2827) [Link]

That's a hack from an ancient time when the Internet used 7-bit ASCII... And it works only for a limited number of characters. I think specifying a proper character set (like UTF-8) is a much better long term solution.

OpenOffice.org sends Dell a letter

Posted Mar 12, 2007 19:59 UTC (Mon) by ajross (subscriber, #4563) [Link]

HTML has numeric entities that can encode any unicode character. And 7 bit ASCII is still a very useful interchange and storage format, guaranteed to display robustly on all devices.

But yeah: Latin-1 as a web page encoding needs to die a fast death. UTF-8 would be much cleaner.

OpenOffice.org sends Dell a letter

Posted Mar 13, 2007 13:39 UTC (Tue) by xanni (subscriber, #361) [Link]

As it turns out, the character encoding *is* UTF-8; it's just wrongly specified as ISO-8859-1 in the headers. Manually override to UTF-8 in your browser and everything displays correctly. Looks like someone at LWN needs to fix their HTML headers!

Encodings

Posted Mar 13, 2007 14:05 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

LWN needs to fix its handling of encodings in general. It's very much on my list to deal with this issue...but the list remains long...

Encodings

Posted Mar 13, 2007 15:17 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

If you opened the source up someone else could fix it for you!

;}

Perhaps ...

Posted Mar 12, 2007 22:12 UTC (Mon) by AnswerGuy (subscriber, #1256) [Link]

Perhaps we should look at an alternative approach to this issue. How about if we work within the same model as the competition here ... we subsidize Dell to include an Open Source Solutions DVD with their systems.

This DVD could contain a short video (playable on Windows, in a normal DVD player, or under Linux?) introducing FLOSS ... and giving directions on how to boot the same DVD and use it to install Linux (and OpenOffice.org) on the system (multiboot or complete).

In other words ... let's use roughly the same approach as the "crapware" vendors.

The question then becomes ... who wants to commit the funds to such an endeavor? We're probably talking about a few million U.S. dollars per year (assuming something like $5 to $10 per system?).

Soliciting Dell for funds is a bad strategy in this case. It would be the right strategy if they had something to gain by the donation --- but we've already established that Dell doesn't perceive any benefit to replacing MS Windows (which enables them to include a boatload of subsidized crapware while passing the direct OS licensing costs neatly on to their customers).

Sun funds OpenOffice because it helps ensure an available, portable tool suite that enables usage of Solaris (SPARC and x86) on more systems ... which, in turn, enables sales of their hardware. They also benefit from further viability of their Java offerings (since they still sell a number of services and products based on Java even as they are giving away and opening up the core of the language).

IBM funds a number of open source efforts because the currently position themselves primarily as a professional services and integration company. So they benefit from having portable tools that can run on their p and z series (POWER and S/390) "big iron" systems as well as in other ways).

Where can we find a way for Dell to benefit from any migration towards our software?

JimD

Perhaps ...

Posted Mar 13, 2007 3:36 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

""Where can we find a way for Dell to benefit from any migration towards our software?""

When people start wanting Linux machines for large scale business desktop deployments they may choose to use Dell if the price is right.

What else would they get out of it? They are a PC hardware company and they sell PC hardware. If end users want Linux machines and they don't have them then their potential business goes to HP or some other competiting hardware.

Even if a company buys 90% Windows hardware and 10% Linux hardware, what do you suppose is the chance that they'd rather go with a hardware vendor that can provide for both rather then having to go to different vendors for different OSes?

Perhaps ...

Posted Mar 13, 2007 6:38 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Almost zero ? I'm working in company where 90% desktops are Linux and 10% are Windows. Yet it buys all desktops with Windows (and some - from Dell). There are few reasons but mostly it boils down to the simple logistic: it's not known in advance if this or that system will be used with Linux or Windows - better safe then sorry. If all systems have Windows license you save on license management, etc. In short: if you need mix of Windows and Linux on desktop - it's just easier to buy all systems with Windows...

Servers... servers are different. You don't switch from Linux to Windows and back at the drop of hat on servers...

Perhaps ...

Posted Mar 13, 2007 8:56 UTC (Tue) by hein.zelle (guest, #33324) [Link]

> Where can we find a way for Dell to benefit from any migration towards our software?

I think the advantage is already there, but they're either not seeing it that way, or bound by other reasons to supply only microsoft. The plain advantage for Dell would be that they can offer a system with a full operating system and software installed, at a lower cost for the consumer. If they did that, many consumers would certainly bite, increasing Dell's sales.

Dell addicted to the upsell and the kickback ^H^H marketing assistance

Posted Mar 13, 2007 11:43 UTC (Tue) by gdt (subscriber, #6284) [Link]

Dell makes money from people ticking the "Microsoft Office" box when ordering a machine. Why would they offer a competing product that would lower the odds of someone selecting the upsell?

Perhaps there are reasons, but I don't see them in the letter.

For this, and a Linux option, to succeed Dell are going to need to reinvent themselves. Luckily for us, that's happening so for once our timing is good.

Dell have been burnt badly by hanging onto their Intel kickbacks as long as possible and having HP walk away from them by giving customers a choice. Perhaps Dell would listen to a story saying "this is the same scenario, don't make the wrong decision this time".

Dell's Linux support is excellent -- on their servers. So parts of the company do understand Linux.

On the Linux support issue, "which distribution" is the wrong question. The answer is "any distribution you please if you put patches to the mainline kernel". Then the support monkey moves from Dell to the Linux distributor. Even if Dell supported only RHEL it wouldn't matter as long as the patches for that support went upstream. What is important is to support all of the hardware on the laptop or desktop, this implies that the message needs to make its way to the hardware designers that the availability of Linux driver free source code or non-NDA programming specification is a new constraint on component choice.