Fwd: [Promotion] Rolling up things

[Quim Gil]

(((Please note: this discussion is still not helping us having common
targets and topics to market, therefore is not helping either to agree
on how we could collaborate marketing the free desktop)))

The FC Barcelona winning every match in every competition would kill a
lot of the football spectacle. Like Schumacher almost did with the F1
- or Windows OS would do if Mac or GNU/Linux wouldn't exists.

KDE seems to perform better in this aspect, GNOME in this other. GNOME
seems to win there, KDE seems to win here. KDE needs to put more
effort in that field, GNOME needs to improve here... Some users think
that [name your desktop] is better doing X while other users think
precisely the opposite... This is the kind of healthy competition I'm
talking about.

Also, we need diversity. Imagine that some engineers would invent the
perfect motorcycle, that would make all the rest useless, ugly, moving
waste. That perfect motorcycle would kill motorcycling. Instead,
having BMW, Harley Davidson, Yamaha, Gilera, etc makes this sport and
hobby alive with lots of 'passionate users'.

On 12/29/06, Thilo Pfennig <tpfennig at gmail.com> wrote:

> ( If it had
> benefitted both - this is no competition)

Excuse me? Do you practice any sport?  ;)

8 runners in the 100m final in the Olympic Games. Just one winner but
3 other athletes beat their respective national marks and the other 4
reach their own personal marks. The 8 runners benefit and it was a
hard competition.

KDE and GNOME benefit from fair competition based on own improvements.

> I think the historic split is very costly.

How you know? Maybe having just one free alternative would have
implied a slower development. Also, let's not forget that GNOME and
KDE are also better thanks to all the lightweight free desktop family,
a real alternative in many scenarios. I don't think the existence of
XFCE, IceWM etc is costly, they help a lot making "the free desktop" a
real alternative.


> I think collaboration AFTER development will always be more costly
> than if we would work on the common desktop user experience - on
> bringing a free desktop to the users.

I recommend you to keep the discussion here at a marketing level. In
terms of development we are already collaborating BEFORE and DURING
with acceptable levels of success. It's in the marketing discussion
where we are somewhat stuck.

-- 
Quim Gil /// http://desdeamericaconamor.org