Sorry, this is rather long.
Jason W. May wrote:
>
>Andrew Simmons wrote:
>>
>> I've often thought that an answer to the problem of marketing Perl
>> to would be a collaborative effort, funded by:
>>
>> (a) the usual suspects (O'Reilly, Activestate,..),
>>
>> (b) by appealing companies and organisations that have benfited
>> from Perl, and, especially:
>
>Great idea. Several companies have been mentioned on this list who
>have benefited from Perl. How would you suggest appealing to them?
Ummm... in an organised manner! Preferably organised by someone
with experience approaching well-known firms and getting decisions
from them. (That's not me, BTW.) Eg., I have no idea whether the
best approach would be to go to the marketing people first, or to
known Perl users in, say, their own network admin people.
>What form would their contribution take? If money, where would
>it go? If not money, then what?
It would be nice to avoid actually collecting funds, bank it,
etc, but to get the firms to book the space themselves -
but then I suppose we'd lose bulk & advance booking bonuses
if it was booked in lots of dribs and drabs with inconsistent
artwork, etc.
*Now there's a thought - anyone know of an ad agency that uses
Perl heavily and might give cheap rates? Nah, I'm dreaming
aren't I ;)
Originally I was thinking of cheap quarter page ads in the dead
tree weeklies. These days I imagine banner ads are pretty cheap;
I'll try to dig up some info on costs.
>> (c) contributions from Perl developers.
>
>This is trickier. From my observation of the Perl developers that
>attending TPC, I didn't see a lot of folks with money to spend on
>activities of this sort. Marketing on a true commercial scale is
>extremely expensive - full page ads in industry periodicals, booths
>at trade shows, and of course tschochkes (stuffed camels, anyone?) -
>and collecting $50 from a couple of hundred folks doesn't stretch
>too far.
Well, the priority would be lots of small, discretely placed
stuff (where small and discrete means cheap.)
>I think your suggestion (b) is the key one. This is where you'll
>find people with money to spend. The challenge is to figure out
>how to persuade them to invest in marketing of open source technologies
>like Perl.
Show them that there's something in it for them:
- a cheap way to get good associations going in the minds of
developers who already know Perl, ie future customers... because
Perl is so widespread, yet so low on the radar of most firms,
I suspect they ($large_co) would get credibility points with
existing users just for knowing it exists.
- a cheap way (compared to, say, building their own Linux distro)
of getting associated with Open / Free software. Economic
stresses, and Microsoft's worsening problems, can only increase
the profile of Open Source / Free software amongst the PHBs;
this could be a once-in-a-lifetime chance for them to get in
early on "the next Linux" or "the next Apache".
- they'd get more, and better quality, applicants for Open/Free
jobs.
- they might even get increased business from customers who are
introduced to Perl, save money, and thus have more to spend
on $big_co's expensive services ;)
\a
