On Sat 10 April 2010 9:17:43 am Nelson Marques wrote:
Using your arguments in a little bit of exaggerated way would lead
for
example to using Adobe Illustrator for artwork, Photoshop for other stuff and would exclude those that don't have these tools ...
That's not what I had in mind. There are some tools (in my field data mining and data analysis that if they were not present in Linux, I wouldn't be able to swap from whatever to Linux). The open source alternatives are not mature, and probably will never be mature. If we look at the "Cathedral and Bazaar", you will find that most Marketing professionals are not programmers, so that model applied to "PSPP" for example would never work. The maturity level between PSPP and IBM alternative SPSS is abyssal. (http://www.gnu.org/software/pspp/VS http://www.spss.com).
And personally, this is the biggest problem which I see in Eric Raymond's views. When it comes down to it, we're only hurting ourselves in the long run to provide our content primarily on non-free distribution channels primarily, with the "other" "non-user-friendly" distribution channels being an afterthought as you seem to be implying. I respect Eric Raymond occasionally, but this is simply irresponsible to our community in the long term view. Our content should be available and advertised in _free_ formats first and foremost with the non-free channels to be "second class" citizens, rather than our freely available content. This keeps people like me and countless others in Fedora who look at non- free content as a detriment to our distribution, while also catering to the mainstream.
Using your examples, my GIMP knowledge is enough for dropping Photoshop... my Corel skills are a good reason for not using Inkscape. But that isn't a problem for me because I'm not an artist neither I produce artistic content, just some casual photo editing, color messing, cropping, etc.
Considering the achievement of the last 10 years, and looking to the future in maybe a naive way, but I could say that eventually FOSS has everything to become industry mainstream... we're mainly lacking some market volume shares for it happen (and that won't happen based on Cathedral and Bazaar model).
Here's the big thing I see when applying the Cathedral and the Bazaar "model" to this case: ESR wrote that with attracting _users_ to the software. We, as Fedora marketing, are looking to attract contributors as well. There comes a specific turning point where someone involved in our distro as a user realizes that things like this are important and need to be considered. We are marketing to those people as well, people who _will_ care about free content at the end of the day.
Anyway, neither I've taken you by a radical, neither I want to sound like a radical. I'm trying to see if we can hit a wider audience and get more proffit (not revenue) out of it.
And IMO this can be done by providing our content as free first and foremost, rather than as an afterthought. This is why I like Nick's original proposal. It's not despotism, but pragmatism.
nelson.
Ryan