[OT] Re: FDS

[Paul W. Frields]

On Thu, 2007-03-01 at 23:55 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>  Paul W. Frields wrote:
>  
>  > Actually, this *is* an interesting perspective of many users (of
>  > anything, as a matter of fact), that tends to take root when the vendor
>  > or offering entity doesn't have any clear hooks on which they can
> "sell"
>  > a product.  This has been written about in a bunch of places, but I
>  > think most recently I've seen it come up tangentially on the "Creating
>  > Passionate Users" blog, which everyone around here should probably check
>  > out -- if only for a couple of priceless articles on good user manuals.
>  > 
>  > FDS may or may not be fantastic, but it is poorly "marketed" and for
>  > darn sure it doesn't get talked about much. 
>  
>  I dont know where you are looking but I see it talked about in even 
>  other distribution forums quite often. 
I don't think its visibility is as good as it could be.  In part that
could be due to the fact that good practical documentation is a little
harder to find (and, to be fair, produce) for this kind of product.

>    Quite a lot of that may be
>  > due to the fact that the folks working on it are very busy trying to
>  > make it better and don't have time to do that important user outreach.
>  > Fedora does a pretty good job project-wide on the whole, but even we can
>  > have problems from time to time getting our important messages out.  And
>  > FDS is a weird subproject that hasn't received a lot of love from the
>  > community, and has been more of a "throw it over the wall" contribution,
>  > albeit a really cool one.
>  
>  Are you talking about perception or reality? Reality is that Fedora 
>  Directory Server has full time developers working on cleaning up the 
>  codebase (lots of cruft from its life as Netscape Directory Server) and 
>  adding new features. fedora-ds-base is even in Fedora Extras now thanks 
>  to folks from the community working on the reviews and sending patches. 
>  Java is a blocker for the nice gui on top but we should reach there soon. 
Number of developers is not equal to marketing.  New features and
presence in the repositories is not equal to marketing.  GUI is not
equal to marketing.  My point was not that FDS is not good -- I actually
like it and use it at work.  But this is not the first time I've heard
people say "Huh?" or misunderstand the feature set when I tell them
about it.  That tells me our message is not getting out.  *That's* about
marketing.  

This is merely a reminder that we also want to guide perception in
addition to providing real results.  Further discussion probably belongs
elsewhere for now since we're way OT here.  Reality is for developers,
and perception is for marketers.  There's good work to be done by both.

-- 
Paul W. Frields, RHCE                          http://paul.frields.org/
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