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NeoOffice :: View topic - 3.2 Fantastic and Donation is Reasonable
3.2 Fantastic and Donation is Reasonable
 
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gbh
Councilperson


Joined: Jul 28, 2007
Posts: 172

PostPosted: Mon Apr 25, 2011 5:46 am    Post subject: 3.2 Fantastic and Donation is Reasonable

First, let me state this- I do not work for NeoOffice and am not a plant to post this. Rather, I am a business user who believes I need to say something about my experience with NeoOffice.

I wanted to let you know 3.2 is working great and how much I appreciate this excellent software and your superb support of the very few problems we've ever had. I have tried nearly all the variations- OpenOffice, LibreOffice, Symphony, etc., but none are close to the reliability or quality of NeoOffice, much less the support. Our business moved completely to NeoOffice several years ago and the experience has been phenomenal- goodbye Microsoft Office.

I am not an expert on the license issues and the debates over donations. However, I will say from my personal standpoint that a donation for NeoOffice is perfectly reasonable given the huge time and effort you have put into this and the substantial bandwidth costs. You can't be expected to starve while you do this! I suspect given your skills you could earn a lot more somewhere else, but you're doing this because you love it. Patrick, Ed, Lorinda, and colleagues, thanks for your commitment to this, which is greatly appreciated.
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pluby
The Architect
The Architect


Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949

PostPosted: Mon Apr 25, 2011 11:46 pm    Post subject:

Thank you for the compliments. It is nice to hear from one of our big donors that they find value in what we do.

I would not worry too much over the complaints that people post on other sites. To be honest, Ed and I really aren't worried about them as over the 8 years since we founded the NeoOffice project, Ed and I have continually seen blatantly wrong posts on the web ranging from accusations of GPL violations to we are evil for asking for any donations at all.

The truth is that NeoOffice has lasted this many years without Ed and I going broke because we recognize our limits. We know that we are only 2 engineers so we focus on only a few things:

- Making NeoOffice as stable as possible by fixing the critical crashing and hanging bugs. Many are OpenOffice.org or Go-oo bugs, but if they cause a crash, we try our best to fix them.

- Focusing only on Mac OS X. AFAIK, Ed and I are the only professional Mac engineers working on OpenOffice.org or an OpenOffice.org variant. Sure, OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice have a Mac version, but AFAIK neither organization has any full-time Mac engineers on staff and it appears that Mac is only a "checkbox requirement" for both organizations.

- Focusing on integrating new features of Mac OS X that are important to users and are compatible with the OpenOffice.org code. While people have great ideas and great needs, we try to focus on Mac-specific features that easily fit within the Windows-oriented design of OOo and are easy enough to support. We look at things like spellchecking, Services menu, and Image Capture, not "overhauls" like replacing the entire user interface.

Basically, by ignoring the constant demands and complaints for us to be all things to all Mac users and focus on the critical areas that make a difference, we have been able to keep the NeoOffice project running for 8 years. I think we can definitely say that we have beaten the odds given that most small businesses fail within the first few years.

Originally, one of the primary motivations for starting this project were companies that did not disclose information and appeared to be taking advantage of liberal terms in open source licenses (thus our love of GPL). It then expanded to a hobby. Soon it became clear that people were interested in this thing we had created, and so we invested a lot of our time and money to keep up with the demand.

The majority of "open source" is driven by corporations, by large sponsors and "benefactors" who see collaboration as a way to spread risk of patent litigation or avoid expenses of maintaining in-house projects. And those projects are made known through corporate spending on marketing and "feel-good" marketing campaigns to let the world know how generous they are for "giving" back.

We're different. We still are, and always have been, the "two guys in a garage". We aren't a large company using free software as a "loss leader" product for their other commercial products. We do this because people wanted some solution and seem to appreciate what we provided them, a tailored and stable Mac experience.

So we began to think of ways to figure out how to provide the product and the service people wanted. To upgrade from just a few hour a week hobby it was clear we needed to find a way to staff this project, and that means we needed funds and for someone to quit their day job. The hobby had to become a livelihood.

It has not been an easy transition and has required a lot of personal decisions and personal stress. No public service comes for free, and over the years we've continually tried to find novel ways to keep this project viabl. What has really made the difference for us are three dedicated groups of people:

- Big donors - By paying for direct support from Ed and I, they are basically funding fixing of the really critical NeoOffice and OpenOffice.org bugs.

- Support volunteers - We have never had more than a dozen people doing support volunteer work at any one time. But the people that have helped have done amazing work in helping people make use of NeoOffice and they have given Ed and I some much needed help in testing.

- Small donors - A $10 donation does not go very far by itself. But when we get a thousand or more such donors over the lifetime of a release, it enables us to work on improving NeoOffice instead of fundraising.

All of these groups are small but each helps keep this project alive. We are committed to making the best product that we can. Some people may disagree, but we personally feel compelled to "stratify" our attention. We are also pragmatists. We feel compelled to give our attention first to all of the people that help keep this project alive as our way of thanking them. Without their support this whole project would have collapsed years ago, so they deserve our focus as without them no one would have NeoOffice today.

We are both very competent engineers with many years of C, C++, Objective-C, and Java experience. We are both Mac users for decades, and our passions as users hopefully help us make a better Mac product. $100 for support for a year may sound extremely high for the average person, but if you have run a small business or IT department it is not. I have not seen any place else where you can get direct access to engineers that can fix most any crashing bug within days for $100 per year. I have run both small businesses and IT organizations serving thousands of users and your average support contract generally provides only software upgrades and direct contact with the engineer generally costs thousands of dollars (or more) per user if it is even available at all.

I don't want to sound like we are the only people that can do something like NeoOffice. We are definitely replaceable. I am absolutely certain that if a small group of OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice engineers really wanted to, they could take our code and make a better product than we have. The reality, however, is that no one has so far.

When I look back over the last 8 years, what really amazes me is that 2 engineers, a small group of support volunteers, and a few hundred big donors have made NeoOffice possible. I am personally very impressed at how much we have done with so little resources and only one full to part time engineer.

Looking at it another way, if we had 5,000 users donate $100 per year and 50,000 users donate $10 per year, we would be able to actually employ Ed full time as well as 2 more experienced OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice developers. A million dollars may sound huge to an individual, but my estimate is that Novell's 10 or so LibreOffice engineers is likely costs Novell $2 million or so per year and Oracle's 50+ engineers, testers, and documentation writers probably costs Oracle $15 million or more per year.

We are proud of what we've accomplished and continue to provide, and we think it's valuable. Is NeoOffice compliant with the "open source movement"? Who knows and, frankly, I don't care. Based on my experience, things like brands, ideals, and movements do not matter. What matters are the people who have helped us create something that hundreds of thousands of Mac users use every day. For as long as we can, we will continue to be here for all of them.

Patrick
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