Re: Marketing (not only for FOSDEM 2005)

[Markus Hitter]

Am 09.01.2005 um 09:55 schrieb Stefan Urbanek:

> Giving out a marketing CD 
> <http://wiki.gnustep.org/index.php/Marketing%20CD> is very good for 
> partially decided and decided people.

Should be targetted towards people unaware of GNUstep as well.


> Partially decided can browse apps, try live CD.

Given the multi-platform capabilities you'll have a lot of work to get 
something going for all the platfroms. Linux-i386 isn't everything in 
the world.

You missed to target Mac OS X in your proposal, IMHO. There's a lot of 
potential interest of OS X developers because of GNUstep's portability 
<-> Cocoa.

> The decided group can browse docs to look whether it fits their need.

Big part of the docs are proprietary to Apple and you won't be able to 
include it with the CD. Furthermore, as GNUstep develops constantly, 
the CD will age quickly.

> But what do you want to give to those who do not care about gnustep 
> yet?

Some shiny pictures, a description/demonstration/tutorial how easy it 
is to set up simple, yet full GUI'ed apps. No need to demonstrate 
complex apps, they can't be understood at a first glance anyways.


So, a CD is fine to give people something into their hands but to 
really attract developers, you need something showing them the powers 
of GNUstep quickly. Downloading a few megabytes from some web site 
isn't more a hurdle than to copy some stuff off a CD, these days.

After all it essentially comes down to the question: "How long does it 
take to get first development steps done". All the others have shiny 
pictures as well, so this is where you win the "battle".


A good measure might be "One hour from typing the first URL to running 
a Hello-World-like app". Not counting download and compilation times 
but using typical GNUstep development and with an appropriate GUI, of 
course.

The state of GNUstep improved drastically regarding such a goal, 
recently, but still, after a hour, many people won't even have 
collected the knowledge of how to assemble all the parts of GNUstep, 
IMHO.




Markus

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Dipl. Ing. Markus Hitter
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