Patrick Ouellette <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > No doubt every product needs a focus. The rift opened when Bruce > attempted to get the developers to see the value of marketing TO an > audience.
Hmm... the toughest part of a development project is analysis -- figuring out what needs to be done. Marketing (in the form of user surveys, and user feedback) is an excellent way to do some of the more nebulous forms of analysis. But marketing is also used as an excuse by bad managers. As in "we're canning your project because we've determined that there's no market for it." And there's more. Point is: marketing means different things to different people. And, as I recall, Bruce made a statement to the effect that Marketing should be treated as equal to package maintenance. But Debian isn't a development project, and it doesn't make sense to have marketing folks doing package administration and (as I hope I've illustrated, above), marketing means very different things to different people. So a lot of people objected, and there was a lot of this useless talking past each other. And now people treat the whole thing as a rift. Which is bad, in my opinion. I mean, I think Bruce's project should be independent of Debian, just as Debian is independent of FSF. Certainly, there's room for another GNU project in the world. It might even be that some debian developers also contribute to this new project. Could also happen for Cygnus folks or FSF folks. But for people who insist on seeing this as some sort of nasty thing: IT'S NOT. I do wish Bruce would announce his mailing list address so we could say to people "get this issue off the debian lists". [Or maybe he already has, and I've just not seen it yet.] I like the idea, and I'm tired reading messages from people explaining their view of "why it's wrong". -- Raul -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]