Fwd: [Promotion] Rolling up things

[Thilo Pfennig]

On 12/29/06, Quim Gil <quimgil at gmail.com> wrote:

Sorry Quim, but I must disagree, because your comparison is wrong:

> I'm not a football fan but I think we can learn some lesson from how
> football works:

Identify the goals: There are hundreds or thousands of football clubs
around the world, their goal is:

 a. Each team wants and needs to win. If one team wins the other team looses
 b. The investors want to make money, so a team should be popular and
have as many visitors in their stadiums as possible - also public
attention (for selling rights to media,etc. ).
 c. There is a clear dientifiacation between a city and a team or at
least parts of a city.

If at best your comparison can show how different the free desktop market is:

 a. No desktop must WIN. If one desktop looses, the whole free desktop
market looses
 b. Maybe some investors want to make money with a desktop - but if
they want this by reducing public attention of the other desktop (by
making people think their desktop is superior) this is something that

(( Argh, GMAIL deleted my email work: did not tell me that it expired
unless I pressed Send So I only type a few words now:))

Can somebody please show me one example where competition had
benefitted only one DE without hurting the other ( If it had
benefitted both - this is no competition)?

I think the historic split is very costly. If I see something like
this: 20.12.2006 Gtk+ Core Maintainer Shortage
(http://blogs.gnome.org/view/timj/2006/12/20/0) I see the only reason
in the split. I see the situation as dissatisfying - but we have to
cope with it. I can not see any good in this split. I understand the
reasons why it happened or had to happen but I rather find it cynical
if efforts, that try to reduce the daily cost of this split are blamed
to be costly.

It makes no sense to let users, developers, ISVs, distributions,
goverments,... first decide which desktop they want. This is a
decision that should not be made. it is not essential for a free
desktop to be split. Essentially a free desktop is free - and there
can be a choice.

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 can only tell from my local
experience that the choice between GNOME, KDE and other desktops are
much too often the focus of talks - and on the other hand everybody
likes to focus on one desktop. So this means that when we continue to
compete this forces all parties to make decision for one DE and
against the other. And always there will be a party that is not
satisfied, always there will be frustration - like with KDE and Ubuntu
or GNOME and Slackware. I think this competion drives more people away
from free desktops than Windows does. So my deepest believe is that if
we do not solve this in the future (next 3 years) we do not need to
talk any more about cool marketing concepts because we are acting
stupid. Some parties are very involved in one desktop but 99.999% of
the world population just do not care about all this. And you can not
really market one desktop as THE free desktop if they are at least
two. I think there CAN be two, but only if they are not competing - if
they compete there can and will only be one - or a third one will take
over.

I think competion can make some sense on an application level (best CD
burner, best database application, best mailer) - but I do not think
it makes sense on the desktop. We should not want users to have to
decide for one DE against the other. We just should not.

Thilo

-- 
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