Minority: helping upstream to market their product

[Chitlesh GOORAH]

Hello there,

In any linux event, contributors from various distributions talk about
their particular distribution. No one talk about opensource projects
for electronic simulation. In fact it can be considered as a minority
in the opensource world. It is sad but it is the truth.

However I want to push (with your help) these projects forward in
terms of marketing and distribution.

For the moment, Fedora is the Leader in terms of distribution of
opensource electronic CADs. (thanks to various fedora contributors)
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/FedoraElectronicLab

If one is familiar with proprietary electronic CADs he/she will notice that:
 * open source CADs lacks many features
 * proprietary electronic CADs companies are changing various
languages such as VHDL, verilog implementations and standards in order
to protect their property.
 * 98% of proprietary electronic CADs built and shipped their products
under RHEL. Their Installation manuals includes RHEL as well. In other
words, RPM distros are well known for electronic simulations.
 * proprietary electronic CADs are installed on RHEL/fedora or its clones.
 * Proprietary electronic CADs are expensive and those using them
having more that 20 computers running these CADs. Thus at least 20
computers running RPM based distributions.

As for the open source projects for electronic simulations, their
developers are neither geeks nor full time software developers but
electronic engineers and university lecturers. There are very few
developers. These days, projects such as gEDA and gnucap are active
and paving their way to attract professional designers/engineers.

If one will follow gEDA user mailing list, he/she will notice most of
them are fedora users. As for their developers are some individuals
scattered around the world. They can't not afford to prepare a booth
for an event and talk about their product.

Thus I'm asking everyone reading this mail, please take some time to
think and tell me how can fedora help these projects knowing that more
than 60% of their user base is fedora users.

I'm proposing during any event that Fedora is present, we could let
some individuals (upstream of these electronic simulators) stay at our
booth and talk about their product. Possibly if fedora lacks
contributors to give speech, we can allocate some time to them.

Surely, we give fedora contributors the priority first and use fedora
banners at our booth.

In the past, in Germany(Chemnitz), we let Centos distribute their
flyers at our booth and share good relationships with Centos. Perhaps
we can do the same for the minority projects.

If everyone agrees, we could propose something like:
every fedora ambassador preparing an event decide whether he/she is
willing to let upstream to join his/her team at the booth.

Things that I think we shouldn't do is:
* using fedora money to pay the hotel/voyage of those upstream
* print flyers for upstream

Many opensource advocates the use of opensource file formats or
implementations. 90% of the time, they talk about microsoft
office/OOO, mp3/ogg, png ...
But everyone forgets the Hardware Description Languages such as
VHDL,verilog and SystemC. If one google verilog, he/she will find
various verilog from various vendors. Why ? I think you can figure it
out by yourself.

Fedora talks about innovation. Can Fedora Marketing/ambassadors afford
a little innovation in terms of spreading the word about opensource ?

I understand that it is a fair new subject for many of you here. I'll
try to find time and prepare some notes and OOO presentations of these
languages/softwares before F8's release.

The developers of active opensource electronic cads (I know of) are
* 2 from France: (piklab&alliance)
* 1 from Germany/Swiss german, next to Gerold :) (gEDA)
* 4 from USA (gEDA & gnucap)

Lately, I've been promoting the next "Fedora Electronic Lab" livecd
near these upstream. Most of the university lecturers (the developers)
said that they will recommend it to their students.
Thus we will not only expand the fedora user base, but will also have
upstreams do the marketing for fedora.

Meanwhile, I'll wait for your suggestions on how we can proceed,...


Chitlesh
-- 
http://clunixchit.blogspot.com