[OGo-Discuss] Some impressions and comments about OGo

[Helge Hess]

On 10.12.2007, at 02:32, Bart Schouten wrote:
> So whereas the demanding user wants to know who is responsible for  
> the *problem situation*, the team is only interested in who is  
> responsible for the *product* (more or less), and when the team says  
> "you can fix it if you want to", to the user that feels as if the  
> team is not taking responsibility for the problem situation, which  
> it indeed is not doing, because the problem belongs to the user, and  
> the team considers itself responsible not for the problem but for  
> the product. Okay this may be quite a black-and-white picture of  
> things, but I think you catch my drift.


Its a pretty nice summary and I pretty much share the observations.


However, IMHO "your" ;-) basic problem (an extremely widespread one)  
is that you equal FOSS == free as in free beer. Why should someone  
giving you the stuff for free held responsible in any way? From the  
(GPL) license:
---snip---
   OGo is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT  
ANY
   WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or
   FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU Lesser General Public
---snap---
(BTW: a lot of proprietary software has pretty similiar licenses ;-)

If you want, you can already buy a product like http://www.instantogo.com/ 
  and you get an actual product with someone you can talk to. Or you  
can buy the services of Adam and you get someone you can talk to. Or  
buy development from me and I extend OGo for you. etc etc etc.

As a simple analogy, you can certainly go to a shop and buy a car  
frame and all others parts you need to build a car. But this still  
doesn't enable you to build one.
(eg personally I still HATE setting up mailservers. I never got into  
this and I would always pay for it :-)


Anyways, despite all that ;-), I still have the opinion that OGo  
*should* provide some kind of shrinkwrapped product which can be put  
to use by endusers. That would certainly be a good thing to promote  
the project as a whole.
In fact I have a few ideas on how to do this ... next year ;-)

Greets,
   Helge
-- 
Helge Hess
http://www.helgehess.eu/