Sell sell sell ! Sell GNOME for Christmas !!

[karderio <karderio gmail com>]

Hi :o)

Oups

s/sell/give

Give give give ! Give GNOME for Christmas !!

That's better. Now we may continue :o)

I spent my evening churning out an 'introduction' section for the GUG.
Here is the first draft, it's far from perfect, and I'm too tired to fix
it now... I'm leaving tomorrow morning for a couple of days to help a
friend move, so I thought it may be a good idea to submit it now to get
any first impressions anyone would like to give.

I'm wondering if I may have overdone it a bit. Personally I very much
dislike the in your face, "we are the best" advertisements that
corporations churn out and that I just can't seem to avoid (I don't own
a TV, nor do I buy magazines, but they still get me). However, after
finishing this, I feel like I could sell second hand grandmas, no matter
their mileage :o)

However much like hot air it may seem, it would seem that brainless
propaganda-like pushing of products is what currently works best, so I
would tend to defend the WOW factor in this particular case.

Here is what the planned TOC would look like :

About GNOME
    * 1. Introduction
    * 2. What GNOME is
    * 3. Free software and GNOME
    * 4. The GNOME community
    * 5. Overview of GNOME's architecture
    * 6. Developping software for/with GNOME

This is only the "introduction" section. Of course the other sections
are even more "draft" than this, so comments on what they should be are
welcome.

I of course wrote this in docbook, but I'm pasting raw text for your
convenience. Looking at it in yelp, it seems a bit stodgy, so I'd say
that it at least needs airing out a bit.

I don't really know what sort of feedback I'm looking for (and I'm too
tired to think about it :). A simple yea or nay would be cool I suppose.
I plan to get back on this on Thursday.

Text follows.

Love, Karderio.


v----------------v----------------v


Introduction


                GNOME is a community effort to create a free software
desktop environment, and a state of the art development platform for
programmers. Our efforts actually go beond this, as we also provide much
of the superstructure needed for our work. We strive to create a high
quality desktop according to our principles of which freedom, usability,
stability and accessibility are but a few.
        


                GNOME is free software. This is one of the most
important aspects of our project, as it guarantees your basic freedoms,
freedoms whose importance is frequently underestimated. Virtually all
commercial software today is the unconditional propriety of the software
editor, no matter how much it "costs". Rather than selling the actual
software, the editor charges for a licence, this dictates what the end
user is allowed to do with the software. In stark contrast, free
software such as GNOME grants anybody who has a copy of the software the
freedom to use it as they wish. It also guarantees your right to run,
copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Free software
also provides access to software for the worlds poorer communities, who
cannot afford costly proprietary software.
        


                So what does GNOME look like ? You can imagine GNOME to
be composed of the things that you see on your screen when you start a
GNOME session. The panels, their menus and icons, your desktop, file
manager any many of your system utilities are all part of the GNOME
desktop. GNOME manages the windows on your screen, provides you with
virtual desktops, games, document and image viewers and much more. If
you are reading this, you have probably acquired GNOME as part of a
larger free software distribution, if you wish to get GNOME, you will
find information on obtaining it at the GNOME website.
        


                GNOME's elegant design makes it intuitive and easy to
use for everybody, without compromising for one second on power. GNOME
is suited to anyone, from the novice to the most demanding professional.
A great deal of effort goes into studying the ergonomy of our software,
to make things clear and easily understandable. Our documentation
strives to clearly explain each and every feature ; help on your current
task is always just a click away ! [[- Well this would be true is we had
anybody to write documentation for GNOME. Help ! We're sinking !!
(Please remember to remove this comment) -]]
        


               How do we manage such high quality ? Well, many of our
developers are very experienced professionals, some being sponsored by
major corporations to work on free software. It is with great pride that
we can state that some of our developers are considered the best in the
world by a whole industry. This talent is of course not lost on GNOME,
which boasts greatly above average stability, with tried and tested
mechanisms to monitor and fix any problems.
        


                We translate GNOME into many languages, thanks to it's
great support for internationalisation. This not only demolishes the
language barrier encountered with much of today's software, but helps
alleviate the problems that some populations still have accessing
software. One thing that is very important to us is to guarantee that
GNOME may be used by all. Thus we provide several mechanisms so that
people who have the misfortune of not being able to enjoy all the
abilities that most of us posses are not further penalised by
inaccessible software.
        


                GNOME is constantly evolving, we release a new version
every six months, incrementally adding new features while constantly
consolidating the base. Rather than proceeding with major fundamental
changes after long periods of time, we mimic nature's evolutionary
process, improving things little by little, and adapting to constantly
changing technology.
        


                Catering to software developers is also important to us.
We provide advanced tools, infrastructure, documentation and community
support to them that rivals with today's best platforms. We give them
all the advantages they have grown to expect from a modern platform,
plus innovative and novel features in a coherent and adaptable platform.
Free software gives developers the massive advantage of permitting them
to inspect and modify the platform itself, the possibility for them to
adapt the environment to their specific needs, to modify the system
itself when otherwise they would have to comply with someone else's
vision and to work with and contribute to the free software community
are just a few of the things this permits. This cooperation is
unparallelled, giving developers unprecedented access to a process that
is often regretfully opaque to them.