En/na Santiago Roza ha escrit: > i think we shouldn't be promoting gtk apps in order to boost the gnome > brand, because: This time I don't agree. :) We are saying that GNOME is not a product downloadable by itself but something that can be just tasted and tested through a disto and that the strong label in Desktop Linux. Well, yes and no. "Free software" is also a strong label and, although many times mistaken, is a term recognisable by lots of users. As we know and as we have said recently in this list, free software on MS Windows is useful to get big amounts of users familiar with the 'free as in speech' softwar and philosophy. This is the path Mozilla has followed, now that we mention here and there how great the Mozilla marketing is. Offering Abiword as a great GNOME tool and stating it is free software you can download and test with your MS Window is a way to show how good free software can be, how free as in speech and how free as in bier, and we are putting them in the GNOME path, so if they want more they will find more around GNOME (Gaim etc) and if they want to go really free we will recommend them the list of distros GNOME likes. Apart from this, if Abiword is part of the GNOME project I don't see why the GNOME marketing team should discard the possibility of promoting it also in its MS Windows, if this is one of the best products we have. Apart from this, it is easier for us to agree branding policies with the GNOME tools running on MS Windows than with the distributions using GNOME but not being part of this project. Also, don't lose the perspective and think in the mid term. Either through Mono and Java more and more GTK and therefore GNOME applications will be working on several operative systems. Are we going to forget all this just to keep promoting only the hardcore 'linux desktop' concept we can't fully control, nor provide? Now a question: how did you get into free software and become 100% GNOME users? I'm a persona ;) that may be representative of a type of user that has thousends (millions) of representants out there: I was a MS Windows user, I knew there were free programs I could download and copy legally & for free. I tried, I liked them, I searched for more... One year later or so I was considering seriously to move to GNU/Linux because in the meantime I understood that that was the first division and that a user like me could find a place there. The good free software tools running on MS Windows (Mozilla and OpenOffice.org, then others) were the gateway that lead me to a Linux Desktop. And these tools are what I recommend to any MS Windows user initially interested in free software, or simply "an alternative to Microsoft". They are seed that will flourish their interest in the Real Essence of Free Software slowly and from inside, in a process that will take longer that loading a LiveCD but in a process in which a bigger percentage of user (IMO) end up becoming GNU/Linux desktop users. -- Quim Gil - http://desdeamericaconamor.org
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