Re: Advertisement for gnustep

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 11 Sep 2006, at 20:07, Philippe C.D. Robert wrote:

> 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.

I happen to think that's completely wrong ... as I don't know of  
anyone who doesn't want GNUstep to become a desktop (in the sense of  
being opposed to it), and even if some people were opposed to it that  
doesn't mean they would be able to prevent it ... as there are  
certainly no such people among the core developers.
My strong feeling is that most developers ideally want GNUstep to be  
an entire system!

> > 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?

In the absence of a complete environment ... we need to attract  
people to do two things ...
1. make the gui smoothly compatible with gnome/kde as a transitional  
thing and to attract developers who want to use the API and Gorm, but  
also want to write apps the rest of the free software community can use.
2. build the new apps ... so we will have a complete environment.

So I agree that advertising the ease of use of Gorm and the gui API  
would probably be a very good thing.