On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 7:46 PM, Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier
<xonker@gmail.com> wrote:
You're wrong on all counts.
Happens to me a lot, but hey, cricket's cricket as they say in Oz.
I posted this to my personal blog, having 10 clicks or 1,000,000 does
nothing for me professionally.
Really? So getting your name out there doesn't help? Seems like the wrong setup for a journalist to me, but then I'm only an amateur.
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.
The branding is not for the people currently running Fedora but for people I might convert when they look over my shoulder, see the awesomeness that is Gnome 3 and ask "what's that?". I have already converted two such casual users to Fedora since the alpha came out and in both cases I had to spend 5 minutes explaining what Fedora is and both asked "but why isn't the logo anywhere?". Both these people had never used Linux but were familiar with the Ubuntu logo and brand.
Not to speak of the fact that I gave a 90 minute, visual talk (demos and stuff on my F15 machine) about Gnome 3 at my LUG and people were very surprised when someone asked "what distro is that?" and I said Fedora. Everyone had assumed it was Suse and I got several questions later from people who wanted to try the alpha/beta now because they had seen how well it worked but thought "Fedora is only for hardcore hackers". And these were people that have been using Linux A LOT longer than myself.
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.
At the stuff I saw you do at LinuxTag, you were heavily proposing Suse to users. Who cares where those users come from? They want to get on Linux and you were saying "here, use Suse". You could only do that because Novell has spend big bucks and cares a lot about Suse's branding. The 5 geekos sitting around my house are evidence of that. Not to mention all those slick OpenSuse booths I see at *every* Linux conference. Why are you now saying Fedora shouldn't do that?
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."
This isn't drama. We are discussing a topic some of us feel very passionate about. I've come to love Fedora for it's community AND strong brand. I am proud of Fedora. I don't want that to go away.
If you can't stand the discussion, ignore it. If mentioning this really does nothing for your career then don't mention it. Having seen you promote Suse heavily when you were still involved with that project and now telling us we shouldn't do that for Fedora for whatever reason, seems very hypocritical to me. Coming from someone else, I would've ignored this article, but we all have a history and that plays in how your writing will be evaluated by people who don't stumble through the world blindly. As I've said before, I have no interest or need for personal feuds, but I really hate it when people try to quell valid, important discussions like this.
Best wishes,
Fab