Editorial on competition and choice

Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay sankarshan.mukhopadhyay at gmail.com
Tue Sep 11 09:31:06 UTC 2007


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Nicu Buculei wrote:

> And here I think lies the mistake: don't focus on future developers,

I thought you had written that today's fanboy is tomorrow's potential
developer, however leaving that aside - what do you think would be a
compelling reason for new users to choose Fedora or existing users (from
other distributions) to shift to Fedora ?

> focus on enthusiastic users (don't dismiss them as 'fanboys'), the large
> majority will remain users and this is fine, they may deploy Fedora or
> RHEL in their workplace if they are familiar with it and this is all,
> other will become (directly or indirectly) contributors: developers,
> documentation writers, artists etc.

The Ambassadors normally emphasize the message that "no contribution is
too small, even *you* can contribute" - however, as you pointed out this
is not getting as much impact as it should have been. Given that we
spend inordinate amounts of time going over "Fedora is losing ground
..." threads, there has to be either a truth to it or a perception bias.
We have had Max (among others) saying that Fedora's contribution is
projected to be more of a torchbearer and not the users per country
kind. In short, we might need to look at the definition of popularity
when it comes to Fedora. Accepting all that, how do you think we can
also push the users/contributors per country count up since that appears
to be how various external Linux sites claim to measure popularity ?

> A contribution to Fedora can be as small as an addition to a Wikipedia
> article, a screencast on YouTube, a small how-to posted in an obscure
> forum or a link on Digg front page - those are the things "fanboys" do
> and they are useful for the project.

ACK

- --

You see things; and you say 'Why?';
But I dream things that never were;
and I say 'Why not?' - George Bernard Shaw
www.linkedin.com/in/sankarshan


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