[In the news] Fedora and GNOME branding drama: Missing the big picture

[Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier]

On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 4:06 AM, Fabian A. Scherschel <fab at sixgun.org> wrote:
> 1) I doubt Zonker would have posted something like that while he was still
> OpenSuse project leader. But since he's a journalist again, all he wants is
> clicks and this seems a bit link-baity to me.

You're wrong on all counts.

I posted this to my personal blog, having 10 clicks or 1,000,000 does
nothing for me professionally.

> 2) The market share argument is utterly irrelevant and idiotic. Yes, Linux
> has very little market share and yes, Fedora is an even smaller part of
> that, but if you think it through to the end, his argument ends in "let's
> give up doing a distro", because apparently it isn't worth it anyway.

No, my point is there's really little point in fussing over "branding"
for an audience that is well and fully aware that it's running Fedora.

> If you are of the opinion that branding doesn't matter, than a distro is
> just a curated selection of 100% upstream packages. At this point, Arch is a
> much better distro than Fedora, IMO, because it has an even more upstream
> desktop. But a good distro is more than that and it seems to me Zonker
> should agree with that, considering how much he was constantly perpetuating
> OpenSuse's branding and marketing when he was still working for them.

My efforts were never focused on getting openSUSE noticed over Fedora
or Ubuntu or any other distro. My sights were always set on Windows
and Mac OS X users, not Linux users of other distros.

It irks me when I see a lot of drama internal to a project about
something that doesn't matter when (at least in my opinion) the big
picture is "how do we get people who've never used Linux to move to
Linux" instead of "let's make sure that we reinforce our specific
brand of Linux."

Love and other indoor sports,

Zonker
-- 
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier <jzb at zonker.net>
About: http://www.dissociatedpress.net/about/