[Promotion] Rolling up things

[Sebastian Kügler]

Hi Thilo,

On Wednesday 13 December 2006 20:16, Thilo Pfennig wrote:
> To keep things cooking I like to share some thoughts - some of them
> older, some maybe new.
>
> If we thing about marketing free desktops nad we would agree that we
> need to collaborate (which we actually do), than we would need to
> think about how marketing should be done.
>
> >From the perspective of the unique selling point of all free desktops
>
> - everybody knows that this is primarily in the name. the "free" - but
> often not what is communicated in the first row. Unfortunately I'd
> like to add.
>
> If I look at organisations I see that the organisations oft the tow
> big D's (desktops) on Linux GNOME and KDE have enough work to do to
> organize their own stuff and also some collaboration via
> freedesktop.org.
>
> I like to discuss the idea to make freedesktop.org indeed more
> important than it is today. The idea to this effort and mailing list
> was to combine some marketing efforts. I think some things may have
> been discussed or be done that have not been done if we haven't
> started this (don't know). But I have not seen real forceful combined
> marketing. I think this is like this because the organisational
> infrastructure is still split.
>
> I' like to propose another organisation for desktops: A FreeDesktop
> Foundation. You can look at my proposal here:
> http://wiki.pfennigsolutions.de/FreedesktopFoundation
>
> Please share your thoughts on this.

I agree with you that the shared effort or Freedesktop promotion has not been 
a great success so far, but also that it has not been useless. Having a 
common place to share evangelism ideas and marketing-related issues is a step 
forward in itself.

The point why it's not widely used yet is -- at least from the KDE side -- 
because we're very much in the process of setting up the basics, building a 
marketing team, getting some strategic things right. (Not sure if you're 
subscribed to kde-promo, if so, you might have see some of that stuff come 
along lately.)

During a branding and strategy meeting some weeks ago, we clearly stated that 
we should not work in any direction against GNOME (which is a good thing in 
itself, but not exactly surprising for those that are Free Software people 
rather than of the Not-Invented-Here kind.)

As a comment on your proposal of a Freedesktop Foundation, I'm not sure that 
it makes sense at this point. It's kind of a chicken-egg thing, of course, 
but setting up a foundation is a non-trivial undertaking, and there needs to 
be a good reason to do so. This reason, in my opinion is the need for an 
official body, for example for legal purposes such as holding a trademark or 
licensing stuff as we have with the Free Qt Foundation. Currently, I don't 
see this urge.

I am, however, convinced that as soon as the need for such an official body 
arises, it's a sign that we've grown together much more, and that this would 
be a good thing (not that running a foundation is a funny thing in itself, 
but a strong Freedesktop.org is for sure in all our best interest).

Cheers,
-- 
Sebastian Kügler

KDE e.V. Board Member  |  http://www.kde.org  |  GPG Key ID: 9119 0EF9 
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Your conscience never stops you from doing anything.  It just stops you from 
enjoying it.

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