Re: Sell sell sell ! Sell GNOME for Christmas !!

[Ryan Paul <gaerdin gmail com>]

Excellent work Karderio! This is a good first draft, but it needs some
edits. I'd like to make some corrections and clean it up a bit. Is this
on the wiki somewhere? Additionally, I might be interested in writing at
least one of the other sections myself. What do we have in mind for the
Free Software and GNOME section?

-- Ryan


On Tue, 2006-12-05 at 02:53 +0100, karderio wrote:
> 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. 
> 
>         
> 
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