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NeoOffice Early Access FAQ
From NeoWiki
Note: This Program is no longer available.
This FAQ supplements the official Early Access Program information found at http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/earlyaccess.php.
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What is the NeoOffice Early Access Program?
The NeoOffice project is funded entirely by payments from our users. Since over half of our payments come from a small percentage of our users, the NeoOffice Early Access Program is a way for us to thank our most generous users by allowing them to download a NeoOffice release before the official release date.
For more information about the current NeoOffice Early Access Program, program levels, and payment amounts, please visit the NeoOffice.org website.
What will NeoOffice do with these payments?
The cost and time spent on NeoOffice are trivial for a large corporation, but they are very large for the two people that operate the NeoOffice project so payments are used to help pay for NeoOffice cash expenses like bandwidth, machines, and webhosting fees that we would have to pay for ourselves.
While many free software products like Firefox and OpenOffice.org are funded by huge payments from large corporations, NeoOffice has no corporate sponsors.
Without any corporate sponsors, we must rely exclusively on payments from our users to exist. If users do not pay enough funds to cover the real costs of operating the NeoOffice project, we must scale back the project to fit within the available funds. Since we already run the NeoOffice project with a bare minimum of funding, any shortage of user payments can have a huge impact on what we are able to provide to our users.
In short, giving away software is not a good way to put food on the table and support one's family.
Some statistics:
- Developers currently put in a combined 70-80 hours a week working on NeoOffice
- 2500 to 3500 hours per year depending on payments
- NeoOffice is currently averaging nearly 3 million downloads per year
- As the number of downloads increases rapidly, so does the cost of the bandwidth used to deliver those downloads
- OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice are developed by a small company-sized contingent of paid engineers plus paid employees from Novell, RedHat, and others, with the assistance of true volunteers, and Oracle pays Apache a huge sum of money annually to host the OpenOffice.org website and master download server; by contrast, NeoOffice is developed by two volunteer developers who are not employed by large companies for this purpose, and they must fund all project expenses, including bandwidth, themselves or from payments.
What about the GPL?
At the end of each Early Access Program (which typically runs for a month), users will be able to download that version of NeoOffice for free. If you cannot wait until then to use the version offered by the Early Access Program, the source code is always available for free and you can check out the source code and build it yourself at any time.
Distribution of NeoOffice binaries obtained under the Early Access Program
Distribution of NeoOffice binaries (and all software with the NeoOffice wordmark) is governed by the NeoOffice CD Distribution & Trademark Usage Policy. While the GPL covers the rights to distribute, build, and modify the source code of NeoOffice under copyright law, rights to distribute, build, and modify software branded as “NeoOffice†are restricted under trademark law (and this dichotomy is common among major free and open-source software projects; see the introduction to the NeoOffice CD Distribution & Trademark Usage Policy for examples).
In short, you cannot distribute software using the “NeoOffice†name without an appropriate license from the holder of the NeoOffice® trademark (either under the license terms in the NeoOffice CD Distribution & Trademark Usage Policy or a separate license you negotiate with the trademark holder). This protects the NeoOffice brand and ensures that anyone using software labeled “NeoOffice†is using software built, tested, and released by the NeoOffice project. (You are free, however, to recompile the software yourself, call it “BobOffice“ and excise all mentions of “NeoOffice†from the product, and then distribute it in any manner consistent with the GPL, unrestricted by the NeoOffice CD Distribution & Trademark Usage Policy.)
While it is currently unclear whether we can legally restrict the distribution of NeoOffice binaries obtained under the NeoOffice Early Access Program, we ask that you do not redistribute these binaries to others until after the Early Access Program for the specific binary release has ended (e.g., until 10 August 2012 for NeoOffice 3.3 Beta 2).
Each person who obtains a copy of the Early Access version during the Early Access Program without paying represents $25 to $50 of lost funding that could have otherwise been used to continue development of NeoOffice. Given the large number of people who normally download each NeoOffice release, this could potentially lead to a substantial amount of lost funds and could cause NeoOffice development to cease.
Other Questions?
Please be sure your question isn't answered by the official NeoOffice Early Access Program information.
