marketing Free Desktop

[Thilo Pfennig <tpfennig gmail com>]

(this one goes to gnome-marketing and kde-promo)

I have thougth about marketing GNOME for some time and came to this conclusion:

We do not want to sell GNOME and we don't want to fight against KDE.
So there is only one solution. We must market FreeDesktop instead! I
would suggest to market GNOME and KDE together on many, many
occasions. All Desktops must be presented as options that make a free
desktop richer. Nobody would say it is bad to have Sylpheed AND
Evolution as mail clients. KDE and GNOME do have different histories.
And I don't see any of each going away in the next years. I would like
to see  each teams trying to get better. i think that both desktops
enormously profit from better interaction.  But this should not only
be seen from the developer perspective. Many users  mix application
usages. There are definitely applications on both sides that outmatch
any of the ones on the other side.

The distributions do market both desktops together like printing KDE
3.4 and GNOME 2.10 as features ont their boxes.

I don't know if freedesktop.org would be the right place to start with
this kind of collaboration or if this is the right time or if people
involved really want that?

I think every effort to market one desktop will fail as long as there
are so many options (also Xfce and others). I think it makes things
not easier of you want to market two and more desktops, but is easier
still then if each crew tries to get users from the other. We better
should say that people should either stay at the desktop they like or
encourage them to try out themselves. That would not mean that
marketing the own desktop should not happen any more, but this should
happen for one goal. Windows does also profit from a rich pool of
applications. We should also not hesitate to recommend and application
from the other side if that really is better. This is better for the
users.

What do you think?

Thilo
--
http://vinci.wordpress.com/