On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 2:17 PM, Donald Harbison <[email protected]> wrote: > My Amazon contact informed me by email on Sep 12 that Apache OpenOffice is > now available for download. Apologies to the community here for my slow > action. Many know that I am dealing with a family medical situation that is > taking about 95% of my attention at the moment. > > The downloads are here: > > > http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008XAXAC4**** > > http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0092UELR2**** > > ** ** > > "To make this distributable on Amazon, we had to add a legal disclaimer > stating that Amazon Digital Services, Inc. is not selling the software, but > distributing it under the Apache license." > > > Amazon is to be commended for making supporting the distribution of Apache > OpenOffice by way of the AL2 license. It was months in the works, so now > the burden to make this really work effectively and successfully falls on > our community. We discussed many implications ranging from support to > release management. It's time to pick up those threads in earnest now. >
If we have a contact at Amazon we might want to go through them to make some small changes to the product listing. What is there currently is taken from our website, but it doesn't all make sense in the new context. For example, it says that OpenOffice runs on Solaris, Windows, Linux and Mac. This is true in general. But the Amazon page is for a single platform download. So it should probably mention only that platform. We should probable ask that our Amazon contact subscribe to the ooo-announce list so they are informed of any updates. I don't know of they can provide this, but it would be good to get a regular report (e.g., monthly) of download numbers. Realistically, no one is going to Amazon to search for "Apache OpenOffice" or even "OpenOffice". The real downloads will come from Amazon customers searching for "office", "office suite" or "productivity applications", and seeing the listing for Apache OpenOffice (with a cost of zero) side by side with listings for Microsoft Office, Corel Office, etc. Right now we're on the 2nd page of listings for these searches. Our position will improve as we get more ratings, and more downloads. Note again this distinction: users who already know about OpenOffice will naturally gravitate to our www.openoffice.org website and will get downloads fulfilled by SourceForge. The main benefit of Amazon will be for users who are searching for something other than OpenOffice and are introduced to AOO for the first time. So the product listing page should probably be designed to be especially useful to that kind of user. Regards, -Rob > > Dennis, will you please provide a summary of your experiences downloading? > From there, we can call for volunteers to help work some of the fixes. I am > happy to broker the dialogue with Amazon....(yes, I promise to be more > timely!) > > > Rob, thanks for being the 1st to review the offering! Anyone else want to > jump in and post a review? hint hint.
