Re: [Sodipodi-list] Re: Reply To: Sodipodi / *nkscape...

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On Sat, 2004-02-28 at 14:21, Lauris Kaplinski wrote:

> > Advertising is for OSS as important as for proprietary software and it
> > always was. Think about Linux vs. BSD ...
> 
> It is more complex in OSS/FS. Important for what? What are
> the goals that advertizing helps to achieve?

Actually, I think the term here is marketing.  We aren't going to send
out ads for sodipodi, but we might consider optimizing people's
reactions to it, and that's marketing.

The goal would be the same as in the commercial world: to encourage
people to allocate resources to make the project a success.  Only the
details are different.  A commercial effort tries to get people to spend
money on the product, which is then used to pay people to improve the
product and bring in more money.  A free software project tries to get
people to contribute their time to improve the project directly, usually
without bringing money into the mix.

The name probably is a problem.  When I see the GNOME digest come out,
for example, I skim it for projects I recognize or whose names a
meaningful enough to tell me what they are.  Sometimes I dig into the
digest for definitions of meaningless names; but mostly I just don't
want to spend the time.  As a result, it was maybe six months before I
got around to finding out what sodipodi was.

Does anybody here have marketing experience? I sure don't, but I can
think of one thing that marketers do that might be useful here: a
survey.  If we could find someone who could design a good survey, and
post it in a few news fora (e.g., Footnotes), maybe we could figure out
what we need to do to attract more developers.

Of course, it's possible that the answer might be stuff we don't want to
do (e.g., rewriting in C#).  But it'd useful to know what our options
are, anyway.

One of these days I want to embed guile into sodipodi, so that it can be
extended the way the GIMP can.  That might turn into a way of
distinguishing sodipodi from Inkscape.