hello Bernd,
Seriously where´s the point there? What did they do so great for OOo?
you are absolutely right - from a moral perspective, there are lots of
people who would deserve the (merchandise) funds more in exchange for
their work. but its merchandise (and not reward/remuneration) funds we are
talking about. so its not so much about rewarding for what someone did for
OOo, but more about promoting OOo. in this respect, one important, general
question
is whether and to what extent the channeling of funds/T-shirts on the
user/customer (who have not done much for openoffice) side - as opposed to
developers/suppliers - negatively influences the incentives of the
suppliers to continue with their investment of time and knowledge. we
believe the majority of suppliers/contributers understand and accept the
reward for people who have not done much - given that the reward is
limited (a t-shirt) and that that linking t-shirts to writing thesis with
OOo helps the "cause"
we see a couple of advantages of this "user/student focussed reward":
first, and most importantly, students hear about "openoffice" and (at
least) get to know that it exists: system administrators and other people
like developers know that OOo exists and - for their own reasons - already
contribute towards it.
in addition, and this is also not to be underestimated, students see that
open office is not just a geek thing but it has corporate backing and has
funds available for t-shirts. for many of them open source is still a
"grass roots" geek thing, hobby project.
further, but certainly not least, it shows students that there are useful
templates outthere and even video tutorials on how to use those templates.
the effect of this "thesis promo package" and the overall professional
image that it comes along with should - iov - not be underestimated. it
might also be a good idea to link t-shirts to (user side) OOo course
participation.
finally, giving t-shirts for handing in OOo thesis also links the reward
to something useful, productive (writing a thesis) and valueable (to the
OOo community) as the user needs to spend a couple of months with OOo.
from the user's perspective, the individual learns how to use openoffice
(writing a thesis takes a couple of months). however, we dont expect many
students to write their thesis with OOo merely because they get a t-shirt.
in practise, most students who would get t-shirts under this "thesis promo
package" already use OOo. still, the overall effect on the
customer/student side would - iov - be considerable and it would reward
loyal OOo users.
regarding the absolute costs, we dont believe thousands of people will
write their thesis with openoffice because of the t-shirt.
VN is a student community /numbers of t-shirts, we made the experience
that - quite frankly - not many people know about openoffice (most of them
have not even heard about the GPL/GNU and, to our surprise, most of them
do not even know about creative commons which should be "closer" to the
"non-techie" as it covers music and games). if one wants to limit it down,
one can restrict it to dissertations and use of the templates by Matthias
and Matthias.
generally, our take is that its cheap marketing, increases brand awareness
and
- in practise - rewards loyal openoffice user (most likely those user who
already use openoffice will submit their thesis) and we think that
channeling funds/t-shirts for this specific
purpose, does, in our view, make a lot of sense and stands a detailed cost
analysis.
--
Coreteam VN
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