Re: Fwd: How do we want to do GNOME Marketing?

["Thilo Pfennig" <tpfennig gmail com>]

On 12/24/06, Joachim Noreiko <jnoreiko yahoo com> wrote:

> --- Thilo Pfennig <tpfennig gmail com> wrote:
> When a user boots Ubuntu, they see the Ubuntu splash,
> the Ubuntu desktop background, and the Ubuntu logo on
> the panel. And that's as it should be -- otherwise,
> they'd say 'Hey, I put in an Ubuntu CD, what's this
> Gnome stuff?'

Sure, thats true. This is a a problem of marketing. I also think that
we have to rethink the marketing strategy here. There are roughly two
options (but also ways inbetween):

A. GNOME wants visibility at the user level and therefore has to
implement a distribution mechanism that starts from the homepage. So
this is abot: A user wants GNOME and can get it.
B. GNOME does not care about visibility of its brand at the user
level, instead we are working with ISVs and distributions,... .

I think currently we have something of both but without a clear
strategy. if we do not want either "A" nor "B" we must define "C". If
I should try to define it I would say:

We want users to know what GNOME is and want them to request good and
latest GNOME support from their sources. We then would want the
sources to clerarly indicate that they have GNOME inside and how
uptodate it is - and we must make sure that the quality of the
packages is Ok. There is also a problem of support: If a user has a
problem with one software he does not know if she should go to GNOME
or distribution support.

Generally I think that a distributed service would be better, although
there will always be the problem of quality of the supported packages
and the problem that not all package maintainers or distribution can
handle bugreports for GNOME well. Also currently there is mostly no
way for a user to report a bug in a language other than english.

GNOME should think about the whole distribution and support cycle to
make it better. Maybe one way would be to start to work with
distributors to make GNOME as some kind of certification mark. GNOME
and the distributors therefor have to agree on some standards and
mechanisms. These should ensure a quality level for the software and
the user. So these GNOME certified distributions (where these
distributions could pay GNOME money for) then have a proven support
and software quality. Those distribution than may advertise with this
GNOME quality label.

This would not mean at all to let down other channels - but GNOME
today can not support all possible variations of installations - and
does not want that. A nice thing would also be if one could some work
somehow with distributions and the community to help supporting older
distributions (like Fedora Unity and Fedora Legacy do as seperate
projects for Fedora Linux) or GNOME versions. Maybe one could have a
seperate bugzilla for distributions with old GNOME and then also
collect all problems in this one bugzilla (merge databases?). Maybe
some people than also like to make patches for these old GNOMEs that
then get repackaged. But this is then more of technical discussion -
just as an idea.

There may be other ways to circumvent the "brand problem". I see the
way described above as a good way to move forward for future versions
of GNOME. We can not solve this alone - we need the distributors to
help us and they need us to make a better support and a better GNOME.
And then we do not need to car so much about the visibility of the
brand - we will then agree of how our brand and the distributors brand
must or can be used.

Thilo


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