Re: Marketing (Was: Re: New developers and publicity)

[Dennis Leeuw]

Banlu Kemiyatorn wrote:
> On Mon, 27 Sep 2004 15:22:08 -0600, Adam Fedor <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>
> > What I'm more afraid of is that people will be interested in this, but
> > nothing will get done.  That's happened more than once in the past.
> >
> > So feel free to start this. I certainly hope we can accomplish
> > something.

A very valid point, and I am guilty on a atleast two occasions...
The problem with marketing GNUstep is that it is hard to do marketing 
for a couple of libs :) so we need to define the product "GNUstep".

Which is more or less what Banlu is telling us too below.

What I have in mind is not the "hard-core" approach which you can do 
with a "product", but more the awareness part by creating a Build Guide, 
a History document, a desktop manual so people can have a look what apps 
written with GNUstep look like.
And the next step was the programmers guide(s)... but I am not a 
programmer, so I failed. Thank god there is Adrian Robert to atleast 
fill in the blanks on the API documentation.
From my server logs I know that the programming guides are needed. They 
quickly surpassed the Build Guide as most read document on my site.

What I would like to do is still to try to position GNUstep as a 
developers tool, thus not the DE part. Meaning the framework, and GORM, 
PC, EasyDiff... and probably need a nice GDB frontend too and a Code editor.

That means that for people to get an interest in GNUstep there need to 
be some documentation on:
- Begin programming Objective-C
- Start programming GNUstep
- UI design guide
- GORM manual
- PC manual
- other developer app manuals
And with manuals I mean NOT man-pages but books that can be read online, 
PDF etc.

Next to that there should be some public awareness. Which means there 
should be some pieces of news we can submit to the news sites. The 
problem (for me) with a weekly editorial, is the time it consumes. With 
my current job I can't guarantee a weekly or even monthly editorial.
But it is a great marketing tool if you can submit a progress report 
often, so if someone else is willing to run through the Changelogs and 
create a progress report. That would be nice.
The release early, release often paradigm would also be helpful. Maybe 
from GNUstep-core 1.0 on a release system could be used where 1.0, 1.2, 
1.4 etc. are the stable releases, there is also 1.1, 1.3, 1.5 which are 
unstable but with rapid release cycles. As soon as a piece of 
functionality is more or less stable... do a release.
That creates visibility. If there would be one person to update the 
versions in Freshmeat, GNUstep would popup more often.

This is already a lot to think about I guess... and maybe even in too 
much detail for a start, but... shoot at it!

Dennis Leeuw


> In my opinion. I think marketting GNUstep is a waste because it is not a desktop
> environment. End-users make a system self-sustainable since technically they
> paid (in a way) developers to live. It's better to put marketting
> effort into a desktop
> environment, eg. backbone and etoile. However, it would be better (in a view)
> for the desktop environments to share openness with end users as much
> as possible.
>
> Now for the DE goal if people agree with the above idea.
>
> In short term, I think it is a good idea to have a desktop environment project
> under GNU's umbrella. It is a quick way to have people to agree on something.
> And I'm expecting Adam to start this (if he can agree with the idea)
> to reduce any
> possible social conflict.
>
> In long term, the GNU brand and politics could defer the project. In that case
> some people can start doing something like GNOME did if they think GNU's
> political view isn't as important.
>
> There will be no further opinion from me on this subject because I'm busy
> building my own DE which is focusing DTP and I would like to dictate it. ;)
>
>
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You must learn from the mistakes of others. You can't possibly live long 
enough to make them all yourself.
                        --- Sam Levenson