Re: Pulling this together...

[Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay <sankarshan mukhopadhyay gmail com>]

On Sat, 23 Oct 2004 20:56:36 +0200, Claus Schwarm <c schwarm gmx net> wrote:

> I wrote some arguments into the Wiki. It was my first Wiki page, so
> please tell me whatever I might have done wrong.
> 
> http://live.gnome.org/MarketingTeam/WhyStudents
> 

Quoting from the wiki page:

<quote>
GNOME is in an unfortunate position when it comes to marketing: its
'products' - the development and the desktop environment - depend on
additional software to be useful for most potential users. On the one
hand, GNOME needs an operating system with tools, hardware drivers,
etc., and on the other hand, GNOME needs to provide a very large
number of applications. The missing of a single, but for the user
important application may result in a rejection of the whole system,
including GNOME.
<quote>

The situation is much more piquant since marketing of GNOME
independently of the commercial distributions also becomes a paradox.
In an way, during this thread...the theme that repeatedly kept
cropping up was the definition of the term *Marketing*. Marketing a
FLOSS component (without going into the intricate semantics of what
GNOME actually is) requires us to first come to a definite conclusion
on what to market and where to position. The process of how would come
through naturally after that.

Probably we need to

* create a vision statement for GNOME
* provide a clear marketing strategy which provides for inclusive
participation from the vendors
* create a plan whereby more software developers would be encouraged
to participate
* encourage a varied domain of deployments based around GNOME components.

Regards
Sankarshan