Comment request on some ideas

[Jason Ronda <jrondalinux gmail com>]

Hell list,

I'm a GNOME user since the 1.x days and so far I'm quite
happy (and am a fan of) the project. I've just joined this
list in order to discuss some ideas with you guys that
hopefully could be useful.

I've just been reading a couple of blogs entries
from Lucas Rocha [1] and John Williams and ended
with these questions / ideas / suggestions:

IDEA 1: Paid GNOME Developer Kit

If we lack good documentation why not let the community
finance it?

What if every year we all GNOME lovers could  pay in advance
for a "developer kit" which might include a printed
book, a CD with electronic reference, source code, list archives
and a cool t-shirt?

Say the cost for it is US$ 50 and some 1000 of us around the
whole world put our money where our mouth says we should
put it and we end up with US$ 50 000 for covering the expenses?

The numbers are right? It is enough money for that kind of project?
With that money can be hire an adequeate team and pay the
production cost of the items?

Hey! They say Mandrake Linux is alive thanks to Mandrake Club.
Why not have some of that for GNOME? And the idea is repeat it
every single year!! What do you think?

Oh! And I almost forget it!! If this happens we really need to find
some sponsorship to send a FREE kit to at least one university
or public library in EVERY city in the world with more than a million
people (dunno if my criteria is relevant but that's a start)

Of course the book should be widely available online and perhaps
under some CC (or alike) license.

IDEA 2: GNOME TV

The Microsoftees have their Channel 9 thingie and to be fairly sincere
it sometimes gets a bit addictive. I myself once got stuck watching
their videos and found myself learning interesting stuff about C# 3.0
or their C-sharp based kernel and cool stuff like that...

What would be the stoppers to have some nice developer-oriented
TV show for GNOME? Money? It's just as simple as having a
host, a clue on what's hot with GNOME coding and the money to
visit the guys in their homes and/or cubicles with a camara to film
the episode? Oh yes, we'd surely need bandwidth to host the videos
but maybe some of the big corporations backing GNOME could be
generous with that. C'Mon guys, Microsoft does it.. Why can't we??

IDEA 3: GNOME Printed Magazine

There are tons of Linux magazines around the world. PHP has a
magazine. Oracle and many relevant closed source products have
a maganize too. Why GNOME can't have it?

Would the money paid by the subscribers could be enough to make
it happen? Say a subscrition is some US$60-US$100 for 12 issues
and we get in the first year some 2000 subscribers worldwide appart
for the issues people kind find in the local news kiosks or in airports
and places like that...

Is this viable? Ok, GNOME Journal is cool but it's user-oriented.
I'd love to have  a printed mag for end users too but we're taking we
want to have a cool and sexy platform for developers to work with
and create great third party applications for.

Ok.. I've been bothering you with this large email.. Let's see if some
of this ideas have potential or maybe and daydreaming.

Even if we were far from having stuff like that I really think we should
have that kind of things in our goals list and we should works things
out to make them happen in the not so distant future..

Maybe stuff like that is the key to attracting those developers...

Ballmer knows it well: "Developers! Developers! Developers" * 10

Regards,

Jason

References:

[1] http://blogs.gnome.org/view/lucasr/2005/12/18/0
[2] http://gnomerocksmyworld.blogspot.com/2005/12/relationship-marketing.html