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
--
Ryan Rix
==
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