[Promotion] Fitting apps into the picture

[Quim Gil]

Hi Tom,

Right now I'm filling my brain with the whole *.gnome.org and I reckon
not having the brightest moment to amplify this vision for a
cross-freedesktop marketing strategy.  :)

However.

El dl 07 de 08 del 2006 a les 16:26 +0100, en/na Tom Chance va escriure:

> project tackling such an enormous subject in such an organised manner :o)

Nice to see it looks organised from the outside.  ;)


> It raises an interesting question: where does GNOME (or KDE for that matter) 
> draw the line between promoting applications that are central to the 
> platform, and those that are completely independent?

Right, maybe picking Inkscape without providing much context was not the
best choice. It would be safer perhaps to talk about
http://www.beatniksoftware.com/tomboy/ since I just wanted to provide an
example of a GNOME-related product hosted out of the GNOME servers.

Still, Inkscape is a pertinent example. With the appropriate context.
One of the targets of www.gnome.org are developers, and we will want to
showcase GNOME as a development platform. In this context featuring
Inkscape, GIMP or Gaim makes full sense.

But still, you are right when you mention 

> the huge issue of defining what "GNOME" is, what The GNOME 
> Project should be marketing specifically

Since "hobbyists" are another from our primary targets, it is pretty
difficult to explain something exciting to these users keeping your feet
within the strict "graphical desktop environment" framework. We need to
mention how great are the free applications that run smoothly on top of
GNOME. 

If you are following the (dense) discussion you will see that we want to
promote first (((draft))) the applications shipped in the last GNOME
release or being hosted in the GNOME servers or having a product in
bugzilla.gnome.org. Being there shows a level of implication with the
GNOME project, no matter these applications run perfectly in other
desktops. We want to showcase this and seems obvious that these projects
will be happy being showcased in wgo.

Maybe we want to showcase Inkscape as well one day, but I don't see them
in the first round of products featured, nor I imagine listing them
before knowing that they are supportive with the idea. 


About the common freedesktop strategy, some good points of reference:

- "Freedom" is an intrinsic value of GNOME and we want to be explicit
about this in wgo. This should imply that applications are being
showcased with the message that they are so good that you don't even are
limited to use them under GNOME. Whatch the repositories of your <free
OS> distro of choice, or maybe you have a Windows / Mac OS X version
available as well.

- Standards, integration, compatibility, collaboration... are also
values attached to GNOME, and we will explain somewhere the efforts we
are sharing with other initiatives in order to make not only GNOME
simple, faster, better.  ;)

For example, we are considering (((draft))) putting DOAP at work for
producing these product pages. 

(((speculation))) Imagine an Inkscape product page FOR END USERS, formed
by DOAP fields aggregated with common content simultaneously updated at
inkscape.org and shared with *.kde.org, distro-of-choice.com and
freesoftwarewhatever.org (right, we might want to have different
screenshots for the window managers). Imagine the Inkscape guys provide
the content of those fields, leaving us the ability to do just some
local adaptions. 

Free your mind, the possibilities are endless. First we need to deliver
a revamped wgo, though.  :)

 
> what are the implications for the "Linux desktop" or the "open source 
> desktop" or the "free desktop" marketing ploy, if GNOME.org promotes Inkscape 
> as being "related" to GNOME?

I hope now that context is provided the Inkscape example makes more
sense, or a more accurate sense.

Wait some days/weeks for a draft of an updated "What is GNOME" paragraph
to have a better definition of these implications of the "* desktop".
The trend seems to be taking out the word "desktop" from the core
definition, or at least making it smaller. People don't know what a
desktop environment is, anyway.


> I roll my eyes when I hear people say "we need a GNOME version of K3B" or "a 
> KDE version of The GIMP", as though the libraries used are relevant.

Every step GNOME or KDE is doing helps having to roll less the eyes in
this fashion. We hope the wgo revamp is not an exception. 

If you find a detail in what you think is a wrong direction please tell
us. As I say, having a whole *.gnome.org in the head doesn't help
sometimes keeping the broadest perspective.


> But are we in danger of reinforcing it by 
> suggesting that Inkscape is part of, or relevant to GNOME and not KDE, or 
> vice versa with K3B?

We should make sure that end users and sysadmins understand that willing
to have Inkscape or K3B doesn't make them choose automatically GNOME or
KDE.

But from a platform development perspective it is still a choice for
developers. Troll Tech is doing good work marketing QT, and we need to
do much better marketing our platform.

> or even just abandon that and help 
> Canonical, Ark, Novell, Mandriva, etc. market their products!

We want to help them marketing their products. We think a basic factor
in this strategy is to market appropriately ourselves.

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