Fwd: [Promotion] Rolling up things

[Quim Gil]

I'm not a football fan but I think we can learn some lesson from how
football works: if you try to push a public collaboration between FC
Barcelona and Real Madrid it simply won't work because competition
between both clubs is part of the show and part of what makes the
Spanish League or the European Cup more than just football players
kicking a ball.

Both clubs collaborate deeply along with the rest of professional
clubs in order to promote football as a media spectacle, a business, a
social phenomenon. They do it through neutral organizations such as
the FIFA. Club directives don't play football and football players
don't take part in federation meetings.

Competition between KDE and GNOME is healthy. Add here the free
lightweight desktops and the non-free, and we see how this competition
is helping having better desktops every year (or so) and specially
better free desktops.

But we need collaboration. Technical collaboration around common
standards is working more or less properly, we have seen a huge
progress in the last years. This collaboration is almost unseen by
regular users, just like many FIFA negotiations are almost invisible
to the average football supporter.

We also need collaboration between free desktops, and this one needs
to be visible and perceived by our target audiences. It's like clubs
collaborating against violence and racism in the stadium. Right, I
still think that in order to collaborate properly on this field we
need to agree about the If we start agreeing the 2-4 target audiences
we want to market and the 2-4 topics we want to focus on.

Once WHO and WHAT is agreed it will be much easier to define HOW.

On 12/27/06, Sebastian Kügler <sebas at kde.org> wrote:
> I know that there are a lot of people around who fear that better
> collaboration on this kind of things makes one or the other free competitor
> weaker. My strong conviction is that by better collaboration, and by sharing
> efforts where it makes sense, we can gain much, much more than what we might
> loose by narrow-mindedness of thinking that it's either GNOME or KDE.

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