Re: Advertisement for gnustep

[Philippe C.D. Robert]

On 10.09.2006, at 22:43, Helge Hess wrote:
> On Sep 10, 2006, at 22:00, Philippe C.D. Robert wrote:
> > > Well, for the advertisement. What would you say, _why_ is GNUstep  
> > > good for that? :-)
> > >
> > > Eg Ruby tries to get into that market by allowing the user to  
> > > contruct flashy web 2.0 apps in a few minutes (and they do not  
> > > seem to succeed). Do we have a similiar unique feature which  
> > > could drive enterprise people to try GNUstep?
> >
> > These people are not exactly waiting for yet another cross- 
> > platform framework. IMO the only chance for GNUstep to get some  
> > wider adoption is to focus on the desktop paradigm for X11 based  
> > Unices. But then again, we had this discussion for a very long  
> > time...
>
> Hm, the response is slightly out of context, no? :-) Please don't  
> turn it into the discussion "we had a for a very long time", we all  
> know that :-) The initial point was an agreement that as a desktop  
> we have nothing to advertise successfully _right now_ and the  
> question what we _could_ advertise w/o disappointing people.

Well, maybe was the phrasing slightly suboptimal, but not the message  
behind it ... ;-) Besides, we don't have a desktop (yet) and never  
will because some project members don't want GNUstep to become a  
desktop in the first place. This is legitimate, but I am convinced  
this has negative impacts on the "progress" of the entire project.

> Nicola correctly said that the best thing about GNUstep is the  
> Foundation library. Though I have a few issues (eg bad out-of-the- 
> box FHS support) it can certainly be considered finished.
> Now the question is whether we can somehow advertise this fact?
<snip>
> So the question is whether gstep-base could be interesting for  
> people and why. Can we put that into an ad which triggers someone?

Why do you think do we have "nothing to advertise successfully" after  
all those years? Do you really believe it is sufficient to advertise  
solely GNUstep base in some form or another in these days? Even  
though it is possible to do good marketing w/o having any product, it  
won't actually be easy to successfully promote GNUstep in the  
enterprise world in these days... Also, what exactly is the purpose  
of the amazing Gorm application when there is no usable UI  
environment (exaggerating, I know)? The real strength of OpenStep/ 
Cocoa is IMO the AppKit in conjunction with IB/Gorm, hence this is  
what we should focus on (and advertise), even if it's not yet 100%  
there! Of course this will again trigger the discussion wrt a real  
GNUstep desktop environment, I am afraid ;-)

Anyway, what would be your proposal?

-Phil
--
Philippe C.D. Robert
http://www.nice.ch/~phip