Attention / Interest / Desire / Action, getfedora.org, or why marketing 'the Fedora project' is a bad idea.

[Chris Ricker]

On Fri, 24 Jun 2005, Jeff Spaleta wrote:

> On 6/24/05, Mike MacCana <mikem at cyber.com.au> wrote:
> > Er, why? Why does targeting (or 'pandering to') an audience mean you
> > will likely mislead them more or less than if you scatter your message
> > to the universe?
> 
> Because I don't think fedora or any other distribution is the obvious
> choice for any particular group of people or individual person. 

I disagree. There are obvious niches which specific distros suit quite 
well (or don't fit at all, as the case may be). If you're wanting to work 
with SELinux, you're going to have much more success with Fedora than with 
SUSE Professional. If you want to recompile your system from scratch 
fortnightly, you're going to be much happier with Gentoo than with Fedora. 
And on, and on, and on.

I don't think marketing Fedora should be an 
all-your-Linuxen-are-Fedora-or-die misinformation campaign, but I do think 
there's a role for and a value to positive marketing of Fedora. I think 
I've mentioned it before, but for one example think about the perception 
of Fedora amongst J. Random Linux users at your local LUG (assuming you're 
a LUGger). If they're like the users at any of the LUGs I keep in touch 
with, about 80% of them will have major misconceptions about what Fedora 
is or isn't, and that's something marketing can address. Marketing can be 
about informing without being about misleading....

later,
chris