Re: response to linus...?

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri aracnet com>]

On Fri, Dec 16, 2005 at 01:45:04AM -0300, Santiago Roza wrote:
> > Feel free to write Linus but please don't put any GNOME reference in
> > your signature in order to avoid (more) confusion. It is you who is
> > writing to Linus, not GNOME.
> 
> ok i won't, btw i wasn't trying to confuse anyone, but who cares anyway?
> 
> thanks to the list for pretty much killing my enthusiasm with all this
> over-the-top fear to linus and fantastic stop energy.

I don't think we fear Linus.  Personally, I think he looked more like an 
ass than anything else.  IRC wasn't amusing today so I decided to look
through technorati.com and look at what blogs were saying about the whole
affair.

In general, the feeling I got was that Linus looked more like an ass 
thanks to his populartiy.  Sure I got some "woohoo, Linus is right"
and then in the next sentence I would get "I use IceWM" and by far
both users of KDE and GNOME pretty much reacted the same way.

> > At a Marketing Team level I think it's useful to discuss why a potential
> > user (like Linus seems to be) has this perception about GNOME ...
> 
> yeah you're right, that's our only task about this event, as a marketing team.

I would never consider Linus as a potential user.  The man uses his desktop
as an extension of himself, a third arm in order to facilitate all that
kernel work he does.  The desktop has to react to the way his work flow
goes and GNOME can never help him there.  We are too general.

We're talking about the guy who wrote his own revision control system to
fit his work flow. :-)  So lets not worry about Linus.  He can take
care of himself.  Nat already sent him a patch to metacity that he can
apply that would fix his window manager issue.  It took him all of 20
minutes to do it.

> marketing doesn't have a thing to do with public relations, how could
> i get that wrong?  i'll just ask for a refund on all those books...

Marketing and public relations are two different things.  Intel
certainly doesn't have the same team doing both public relations
and marketing.

> > For instance, with all this issue what I've missed is the possibility of
> > posting an answer in a news section in the gnome.org homepage ...
> 
> you mean a clear, simple, informative, and non-confrontational answer,
> like the one i just wrote?
> 
> oh wait... that's the one we shouldn't be using, because something something.

I can understand you're frustrated by the response here.  I think
you've made that pretty clear. :-)  However, if you want an
effective response I think we can do that with GNOME Journal or
mail journalists who might be interested about the affair.

Nothing draws press than controversy.  If they smell blood they'll
gather like crows on carrion.  Managing that I think is a more
effective response both for public relations and marketing than a
public letter.

Yes, it raises our profile, yes it's public relations but I think we
can do better.  Guest column in a magazine, blog responses whatever.

Another thing you might consider is that the reaction people have to
your public letter might mirror the response from the slashdot crowd.
Although thats arguable. :-)

sri