Re: Create your own customised GNOME liveCD

[Luis Villa <luis villa gmail com>]

On 7/25/05, Marcus Bauer <marcus bauer gmail com> wrote:
> On 7/25/05, Corey Burger <corey burger gmail com> wrote:
> > The idea of an installable live cd is a great one, until you realize
> > the implications.
> >
> > The basically makes Gnome a distribution, which does the following bad things:
> >
> > 1. Gnome does not have the support structure to support average users,
> 
> www.gnomesupport.org
> 
> > nor should it gain one.
> 
> Then what are communities good for? People love to support each other.
> What the fsck do you think Microsoft is making its money with? It is
> tens of millions of people who do unpaid support by helping out their
> parents, grandparents,  relatives and friends. A simple example: how
> many people are really able to install a wlan at home? My guess is
> only 10% of those who have one installed. And the communities are one
> of the greatest strengths of open source. Tell me one good reason why
> not to build on it.

It would not hurt to gain one (it would truly be great to have such a
thing), but we have to focus on things we can do now- and supporting
an installed user base is not one of those things, even if it might be
in the future.

It is also worth noting that saying we support an installed distro
means we have obligations beyond just 'answering questions'- it
implies that we follow bugtraq, issue security updates, fix kernel
bugs, etc., etc. We shoud only take on those very onerous obligations
if we think it would help us market gnome vastly better than we do
with 'just' a demo CD; I don't think that is the case.

> > That is the job of Novell, RH, Ubuntu, etc.
> 
> and Microsoft? By the way; why has Canonical kicked out support to
> Ubuntu instead of doing it under its own name? 

Well, they have only kicked out the ungrateful support- people who
want to pay very much still go to Ubuntu :)

> Simply because that is
> not managable for a company. Have you ever bought a SuSE and called
> their support? They are callcenter loonies having no clue and giving
> you circular answers. Example: the colored side of the DVD must be
> upside.

Like I said earlier, that is only part of support- they also pay very,
very skilled people to patch kernels, issue updates, test updats, etc.
All very non-trivial.

> > 2. You further divide up the mindshare, but directly competeing with
> > the above mentioned distros
> 
> Consequently thinking your reasoning to the end means that GNOME
> should disappear from public to avoid "dividing mindshare".

Taking mindshare from distros that don't publicize their use of gnome
probably isn't a bad thing, but then again, we should be working very
hard to make sure that every distro markets their use of gnome as they
market their use of ffox and ooo.

Luis