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The Document Foundation ponders certification
The Document Foundation has posted a draft
proposal for a certification program built around LibreOffice.
"TDF provides LibreOffice Certification and promotes the ecosystem
through his channels and with an aggressive marketing campaign targeted to
corporate users, in order to increase LibreOffice adoption based on
certified professional value added services for migration, integration,
development, support and training. LibreOffice Certification is fee based,
and fee might vary according to the value provided by the partner to The
Document Foundation." It's worth noting that this discussion is
just beginning; TDF is looking for comments on how such a program might
best be designed.
(Log in to post comments)
The Document Foundation ponders certification Posted Jun 22, 2011 17:48 UTC (Wed) by dmadsen (guest, #14859) [Link]
NO! NO!
The rationale that drives proprietary vendors -- as recognized by the proposal -- is foreign to FOSS.
I was a professional when Novell started the certification phenomenon. It was great for their education revenue, and certainly generated revenue *from* partners eager to use the certification for anticipated revenue.
It was a barrier to competent professionals who couldn't afford to get certified. It acted to artificially throttle the marketplace for service providers.
Do we really want to go there? Do we want to drink that Kool-Aid? Do we really care about "market share"? Is introducing artificial barriers appropriate?
If this is a serious proposal, then it follows that anyone who submits any code should be certified, as how else can you make sure that they understand "the product"? Oh wait, maybe there should be exceptions...
If I want aggressive marketing and increased adoption and a certification program, there's a company in Redmond I can go to and they will provide everything I can possibly want -- for a fee. Their certification programs will be more recognized and more developed than any "LibreOffice Certification". If, as a service provider, I'm going to spend money for certification, the better bet is, indeed, MS Office. Why should I bother with LibreOffice certification?
Can't the money being spent on developing and publicizing this certification program be better spent in other ways?
Perhaps I'm all wet, and I simply don't understand. If so, please let me know!
The Document Foundation ponders certification : please No : +1 Posted Jun 22, 2011 18:05 UTC (Wed) by Alterego (subscriber, #55989) [Link]
i agree with your comment about the problem of the price (money + time) to get certified:
It will be needed for one linux distro + LibreOffice + one SQL + apache + backup + ...
I think the LO money would be better used to lobbying and advertising in europe, which seems strategical place (rising countries are already pro freesoftware).
The Document Foundation ponders certification Posted Jun 22, 2011 19:59 UTC (Wed) by AlexHudson (subscriber, #41828) [Link]
It's not about submitting code; it's about having a mark that can be seen in the marketplace as an indicator of expertise.
If LibreOffice is going to succeed it needs to be deployed in corporate environments. If that's to happen, corporates need to be able to find people they can trust. When you're deploying something new, often you don't know anyone you trust directly who has the skills: in that instance, some kind of certification is more trustworthy than just guessing who to hire.
The Document Foundation ponders certification Posted Jun 23, 2011 0:29 UTC (Thu) by dmadsen (guest, #14859) [Link]
This is the same PR that Novell used, and is widely believed despite it not being true.
In practice, I don't know of too many organizations that thumb through the yellow pages looking for a software service provider based only on some certification.
Think about getting a job: it's not too often that someone is offered a job solely on the degree they have. Do you think that a LO certification has that demand or cachet? (CCIE, maybe. But how much money has Cisco spent on creating that certification's reputation?)
Because a certification program takes some time to get started *and to gain the required reputation*, you cannot depend on such a program for new products. By the time you find someone certified, it's no longer such a shiny new product. For something new, you either go online to where the community gathers, or to a local user's group.
Certainly there are people out there who have expertise who will not be able to get certified for one reason or another. If the certification takes off, they will be at a disadvantage. Is this community?
Certainly there are people out there who will be certified who will be incompetent in practice but able to pass through certification. (In the past, I've talked to people at different companies who learned the hard way that you couldn't trust the MCSE certification. This was a while ago, I assumed MS has "fixed" the certification process by now).
I was NOT joking about submitting code: the ultimate operation of the product is completely dependent on the quality of the code. If there will be a certification process in place for service providers, shouldn't there be a certification process for code submitters? Maybe after they're certified, we can call them "engineers"! It's about trust, right?
Publicly saying that LibreOffice needs corporate environments to succeed unfortunately puts it in danger, because then "non-corporate" deployments will be discounted. This "corporate" attitude forces focus on numbers rather than product quality.
Think about Linux deployment history. If Linux supporters had to have been certified, would we be where we are today?
Key point: If this is to be a community, then it should act like a community, NOT like a centrally-controlled proprietary vendor. If a single entity acts to control "the ecosystem", tell me how this is different than the way a proprietary vendor acts.
If indeed LO looks proprietary, then no matter what the license, it loses because then it doesn't look any different than its proprietary competition. And if we're thinking proprietary, well, we know whose Office suite is still safe to recommend despite cost.
The Document Foundation ponders certification Posted Jun 23, 2011 16:32 UTC (Thu) by AlexHudson (subscriber, #41828) [Link]
"Publicly saying that LibreOffice needs corporate environments to succeed unfortunately puts it in danger, because then "non-corporate" deployments will be discounted."
That kind of says it all, unfortunately. Corporate needs and non-corporate needs are different; incomparable. Addressing one set of needs doesn't mean you somehow raise it as being more important than the other.
Needless to say, I think you're dead wrong. The idea of certification is not that someone somehow knows a piece of software inside out: it's that the vendor has come up with a systematic set of processes which a person knows and can adhere to. It's about standardisation, knowing that you can swap support engineers and the new people can come in and hit the ground running.
Right now, sadly, that's totally missing. This isn't a numbers game: this is a confidence and market issue. Have a look, sometime, at what has happened to many major OpenOffice.org deployments. Many of them have failed, and gone back to Office. That's indescribably sad.
"If Linux supporters had to have been certified, would we be where we are today?"
You recognise that's a hypothetical argument, right? I could say we'd be in a better place, you'd disagree, and we'd be no further along.
But anyway, it's an apples/oranges comparison. There are many different distros (and certifications...) and each does stuff differently. There is no standardisation. But in the LO case, we're talking about a specific application.
The Document Foundation ponders certification Posted Jun 23, 2011 20:48 UTC (Thu) by rahvin (subscriber, #16953) [Link]
It's about more as well. Without certification you run the risk of people with little to no experience pretending to be professionals and burning an entire organization in the process. These incidents harm the entire corporate market as the word spreads very quickly that there is no way to guarantee knowledgeable help/training.
It's also a critical demand of most fortune 500's, just like they won't use software they can't buy a support contract on they won't use office software that they can't find trainers certified by the people producing the software. There are always exceptions but regardless of whether it means anything the fact remains that without it the software is a no go for many organizations.
The question shouldn't be whether certification should be undertaken, it should be how to accommodate the markets demand for certification while maintaining open access to the little guy.
The Document Foundation ponders certification Posted Jun 23, 2011 23:38 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
show me the organisation that does this sort of policing for Linux
there isn't one.
RedHat has it's certification and support, but you nothing prevents any other organisation from creating their certification for CentOS or anything else.
also, was there ever such certification for OpenOffice.org? it is being used in many businesses without such support
where is the certification for Firefox? by your logic companies should not allow it to be used without such certified support companies.
The Document Foundation ponders certification Posted Jun 24, 2011 14:16 UTC (Fri) by pzb (subscriber, #656) [Link]
A lot of companies do have policies of not using software unless they have a support agreement in place with the vendor or an authorized partner of the vendor. This is what frequently leads to companies only supporting IE internally; they have a support agreement with Microsoft but not one with Mozilla.
The Document Foundation ponders certification Posted Jul 6, 2011 0:28 UTC (Wed) by XERC (guest, #14626) [Link]
"... knowing that you can swap support engineers and the new people can come in and hit the ground running. ..."
In the light that everything starts from people and their motivations, should the open source community really support a social process where people are treated as commodity resource in stead of treating them as individuals?
It is a matter of policy.
Another thing that does not make sense to me is that if support engineers perform so routine tasks that they can be trained like dogs, according to the certification program, then why shouldn't the process be automated to avoid hiring any support engineers?
Of course, one of the axioms behind my contemplation is that one only hires people for their unique knowledge, which entails that if one swaps people, then the knowledge leaves the company with the people. (I am of course aware that often IT staff is hired just to do something from 9.00 to 17.00 and please their dumb but snobby boss. Usually it's only the dumb ones that are able to do such IT-jobs.)
The Document Foundation ponders certification Posted Jun 22, 2011 20:45 UTC (Wed) by italovignoli (guest, #75849) [Link]
We definitely appreciate negative comments, but I would like to take this opportunity to make a couple of points very clear:
- the objective is not to make a profit but to help TDF to be self sustaining and independent, so the business model will be completely different from that of corporate vendors (we will try to pick only the good);
- we won't spend any money for the promotion of the project (exactly as we haven't spent any money for the promotion of TDF and LibreOffice);
- we haven't set any price level for the fee, and we perfectly understand the concerns (but one of the objectives of the program is exactly to allow small/medium companies and individuals to be recognized for their skills, as otherwise only large enterprises would be entitled to provide value added services).
We want to find a way to make an independent free software project like TDF self sustaining. Corporate sponsorship and dual licensing have never worked, and will never work. It's a challenge for the entire community, but is not intended to break the spirit of FOSS.
The fact that we have published a very early draft (that you are invited to read in its entirety), is in the spirit of FOSS, as we definitely need a feedback from the FOSS community. If the feedback will be negative, we won't start the project.
We don't have shareholders to please. We have an independent project to grow (which is a completely different story).
As we can't follow the discussion everywhere, if you want to contribute please subscribe to discuss@documentfoundation.org, as most of the action will be there.
The Document Foundation ponders certification Posted Jun 22, 2011 22:49 UTC (Wed) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
It may take years for this to work. I would not expect droves of people wanting to certify, unless it's very cheap, or gratis. But without enough certified professionals, there will not be much demand. And without demand, there will not be much people interested in certifying. Catch 22.
With time, enough people that needed the certification to work on some project (maybe some city or agency migration) will be offering their services, and new clients would notice and evaluate that the support market is mature enough. But again, it may take years.
What can be done? Make it two levels. Create a basic "certification" that anyone can get for free, with just a web form exam. Make the materials available on the net. And make a lot of noise about all this. There are a lots of small organizations that offer this kind of formation (think basic books about Word, Office introductory courses), and would welcome this material. Then, build the "professional" level on top of that, and charge for it.
If you have some money to burn, offer a price for the best introductory materials (try to lure MS Office experts into that, there should be plenty of them and they know users very well).
Now, maybe it's too lake and I'm just babbling?
The Document Foundation ponders certification Posted Jun 23, 2011 1:09 UTC (Thu) by dmadsen (guest, #14859) [Link]
1) Profit or not, your goal is to have people pay you money. The latter is what's important, not the former.
2) You get more money by establishing a higher value of the product (i.e., certification). Value is partially established by demand from people seeking certification, which is driven by perceived demand from end-users demanding certified service providers.
3) If you don't spend money on promotion to both end users as well as your customers (i.e., those seeking certification) to help create demand, you will not have the required perception of offering a valuable product.
4) If you don't have a high enough barrier to entry, the value of the certification decreases. This is one reason why there are multiple "privilege" levels (silver, gold, platinum) in traditional programs.
5) I've read the draft.
6) You do have shareholders -- they are the community. They are also your customers. And your developers. And end users.
7) I'm not interested in subscribing, as I will not be contributing more than this -- I would just be repeating myself (and I'm sure that would be less than welcome).
Finally, I have a few critical questions for you: Do you have the required cash to design, implement, and deploy (including advertising!) this certification program, knowing that there will be some delay before any payoff? Do you have any evidence or numbers that say how this use of capital is a better expenditure than some other? Do you have anyone on board that's designed and run such a certification project before?
These are the same questions that your certification-purchasing commercial prospects will ask you before taking the risk of committing money and personnel time to a certification program. The more money and time involved -- as in a higher-privilege cert -- the harder the questions will be.
The Document Foundation ponders certification Posted Jun 23, 2011 18:35 UTC (Thu) by Kluge (guest, #2881) [Link]
"3) If you don't spend money on promotion to both end users as well as your customers (i.e., those seeking certification) to help create demand, you will not have the required perception of offering a valuable product."
Most office workers need an office suite. If the mindshare of LO among users is great enough, it will be seen as an option by management. Management will be interested in reliable support. There's your demand for certification.
I don't see why initial adoption of LO wouldn't be bottom up, just like that of Linux. After a certain point, it will be seen as important enough that more resources will be spent on support.
"4) If you don't have a high enough barrier to entry, the value of the certification decreases. This is one reason why there are multiple "privilege" levels (silver, gold, platinum) in traditional programs."
The barrier to entry can simply be a rigorous certification program.
I think that a certification program might be a good idea. One problem, though, is that this is a *LibreOffice* certification program. I expect that most of the installed base is OpenOffice.org/StarOffice. As the software diverges, supporting all the variants will be a concern unless/until the OO.o/SO fork dies. That will complicate the market for certification.
Another factor is that interoperation with MS products will be a concern for enterprise management, and offering that kind of training is likely to be considerably more difficult and expensive than training LO alone.
The Document Foundation ponders certification Posted Jul 6, 2011 0:43 UTC (Wed) by XERC (guest, #14626) [Link]
Strange. It seems that You are focused on organizations that _have manegement_.
Given that most of the tax revenue is collected from small and midsize businesses, not big corporations, and given that in small businesses employees often make decisions by themselves more than in big corporations, where the managers need something to do in order to avoid being bored and to justify their existence, then Your view of market dimensions seems pretty skewed.
It seems to me that You're trying to sell something to managers, while most businesses are not that "managed".
The Document Foundation ponders certification Posted Jun 23, 2011 0:40 UTC (Thu) by j1mc (guest, #56848) [Link]
Get in touch with Dru Lavigne from BSD. She just gave a great talk at the Open Help Conference about all of the work she and her group went through to create a BSD certification. Creating a real certification is quite an effort.
This *MIGHT* be a good idea. But depends on the detail Posted Jun 23, 2011 15:40 UTC (Thu) by david.a.wheeler (guest, #72896) [Link]
This might be a good idea. There are many organizations who want support, and aren't sure who to ask for support. If there was a way to know that organization or person X was more likely to give good support, then this certification might be worthwhile. I think that certification marks administered by a non-profit are more likely to succeed, because they at least avoid some of the problems when a for-profit manages the mark.
But this is by no means a slam dunk. It depends on the detail. I would want to find out more about about who are the customers who would be looking for this mark, and what they want that mark to mean.
Good luck.
The Document Foundation ponders certification Posted Jun 24, 2011 5:57 UTC (Fri) by Hausvib6 (guest, #70606) [Link]
Try replacing TDF with some organization name and LibreOffice with some FLOSS project name. This is all about money, yes, this will help adoption in corporate environment but on the other hand this kind of thing (certification) just doesn't sound right in the world of FLOSS.
Some are hippies, some are monks, but only corporate slaves need certification (which of course needs money).
The Document Foundation ponders certification Posted Jul 6, 2011 0:57 UTC (Wed) by XERC (guest, #14626) [Link]
I think that university diplomas are a form of certification. And, indeed, there are universities that count more than others. Also there are universities that have totally worthless diplomas.
Would You like to be operated by a doctor that does not have a certification from a wildly recognized medical university? Not likely, right?
So, in a way, certification does matter, but it matters only, if there's really some content behind the diploma. I personally think that university diplomas are the only reasonable certification in IT. The rest is just too much hype and not enough content, specially given that IT is a field where it's really possible to become a highly skilled professional by self-studying, i.e. without attending a university. For example, I've seen a former electrician, who happened to work in a robotics company and then started to write simple software for his employer's products and went to software development from there on. It took him 10 years, literally, but he was really good. He did miss some things from his knowledge that the people with formal education had, but in general he was really-really good.
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