Re: GNOME deployments

[Claus Schwarm <c schwarm gmx net>]

On Fri, 10 Dec 2004 16:41:15 +0100
Toady <toady gscore org> wrote:

> How about a "Gnome Success Stories" available from the "About Gnome" 
> webpage ? just as what's gtk+ doing.
> (see: http://gtk.org/success/).
> 

I believe the intention of the GNOME deployments page in the wiki is to
deliver just this kind of information. Maybe we can move this on day to
the official pages.


> Now I got questions, I think it's quite something but I still can give
> answers to that when I hear people/companies:
> - What kind of support for Gnome they can have (who should they ask, 
> pay... ?)
> - How can they learn using Gnome (a "Gnome for dummies" book ?) ?
> - How did the success story became a success : what kind of people to 
> hire ? how they convinced the local authorities ? where did they get
> the money for ?
> 
> To me, I got no real answers to that. How can we make this becoming 
> clear as crystal for folks ? (a nice web page talking about it ?)
> 

Indeed, very interesting questions. I never thought about it this way.
It might be worth discussing.

1.) Most institutional users would get GNOME support by their Linux
    vendor, I guess (RedHat, Sun, Novell, or a local one).

2.) It's quite hard to make such a book - JDS still uses GNOME 2.2
    (or used until recently, I believe). How can you educate
    users/ office workers about GNOME when there are up to four versions
    in the wild?

    Such a book is complicated because of the different vendor versions
    of GNOME, too. Are you going to explain all the little differences
    between JDS, RedHat's GNOME, Novell's GNOME, etc... to users?
    Probably not.

    Additionally, I'm not a book vendor but I guess it take a few years
    to sell a complete edition of a book. A GNOME book would be outdated
    soon after it was published.

    How to educate a large number of users is still an unsolved problem,
    and the costs associated with it is probably the largest barrier to
    Linux adoption.


3.) I'm not sure if I understood your remarks, here. Whom do you mean by
    "local authorities"? The management?


Cheers, 

Claus