Re: GNUstep web site and marketing thoughts

[Andreas Fink]

I think the answer lays in the area of who will use the website.

If a developer wants to use it, he will think of frameworks for his app

If a end user wants to use it, he will think of a full fledged desktop with a lot of apps already ready to deploy.

For me the developer is just someone using an SDK to use the frameworks to run on the desktop. So the developer is a special user case.

If the desktop is not attractive, then the end users will not install it, hence developers will at some point waste their time developing for it (ignoring the fact temporarly that you can write single apps who don't care about the desktop environment and just run on any X.org install or even without any GUI).

For me, marketing a fully fledged desktop is the much more attractive view. However it also means we must get a working reference implementation into the distros. Something where when one installs XYZ Linux, a question would appear saying "What Desktop do you want to run on: GNOME, KDE, Gnustep,...?"

Given GNUStep is kind of a  "clone" of MacOS at some point, I believe having a well working desktop would bring MacOS developers over to the platform to use GNUStep as the tool to port their Apps to supported GNUStep Platforms. Of course all the latest new AI and ML and Metal implementation stuff would be missing but there are LOTS and LOTS of applications out there who could be ported easily. But it all starts with a working environment a developer coming over from MacOS could use.

On 11 Jul 2024, at 15:37, Damianos Sidiropoulos <damianos.bouzouki@gmail.com> wrote:

Lars: Thank you for the links. I'll take a look through those.

Daniel Boyd: As far as the philosophical question vs the marketing question. You need to know the answer to the first question. Target audience will affect the answer to the marketing question

To everyone else:

I didn't realize there was disagreement to the idea of GNUstep being a framework vs something else. This would explain some of the decisions made for the current web site.
I think that the "just a framework" question needs to be answered by the project before a website update can start.

I will say this. If the project does decide to go down the road of being just a framework. There will be advantages and it doesn't mean that anything needs to be lost in terms of the desktop apps related work.
It's just that apps would exist in whatever official desktop GNUstep wants to create or endorse. The web properties for both framework and desktop would be more focused as one would focus on developers (creating software), the other would focus on end users (consuming software).
There could even still be mention of desktop building on the GNUstep framework site by having a section that is about platform building, but this too would be developer focused.

The point is from a marketing point of view, things can be simplified because there would only be a single audience GNUstep is trying to reach.

WIth that said, my ultimate goal here is to help with the GNUstep website and get the word out about GNUstep.
In order to do that, there needs to be agreement about what GNUstep actually is and who it is trying to cater to.

On Thu, Jul 11, 2024 at 8:10 AM Daniel Boyd <danieljboyd@icloud.com> wrote:

I think it’s important to make sure we are all answering the same question. There’s a philosophical question, “what is GNUstep?” And there’s a marketing question, “how do we present the project to the public in order to grow the project?” I think the second question is more important.

I also think gnustep can be a framework and still have reference applications. I don’t think anyone would argue that GWorkspace hurts GNUstep’s cause. On the contrary, it is a vivid illustration of how powerful gnustep (the framework) is.