On Fri, Aug 15, 2003 at 01:31:37PM -0700, Hurd Advocate wrote: > - Do we suffer from a lack of charasmatic leadership and direction?
If there is anything that the Hurd does _not_ lack, then it is direction. It seems to me that it actually has too much direction. :) > - Is advertising our problem? Do we not get enough exposure to > potential developers? The advertising has been improved significantly in the last couple of years. But we need to continue being active in this area. We need to give talks, distribute flyers (I started some work on this a while ago and will finish it this or next year), talk to people at conferences, write articles for magazines and web sites, etc. As Paul Graham noted, people will not listen to you when they see that you are there; they will listen to you when they see that you are _still_ there. I think we've been around long enough now that people start to believe that the Hurd actually is a project worth developing, so I'd expect the problem of having too few developers to become smaller and smaller. However, we should make it as easy as possible for people to make an initial contribution, because if someone has made something once, it's very likely that the person will do it again (a concept also used by drug dealers, the church and many others). Maybe asking people who are merely interested in the Hurd (e.g. on IRC) for advice or about their opinions on implementation or design details could help here. When we tell people about the Hurd, we should not waste time with telling them about technological details or things which are unusual about the Hurd. Someone who is interested will figure these things out anyway. Instead, we need to tell people about advantages. This means that to promote the Hurd, one needs to know not only *how* things are done, but *why* things are done this way, so probably one needs to know a lot about the Hurd before being able to effectively promote it. A danger that needs to be avoided is that people can easiely get the impression that the Hurd is hard to learn when you tell them what is different about it (as opposed to saying what its advantages are). Remember, people are lazy and want to reuse their existing knowledge; so always mention that the Hurd is not only very flexible, but also very _compatible_. (I think the Fresco people have the problem that their project looks too different.) I could go on for hours about this... Cheers, GNU/Wolfgang -- "A good programming language should have features that make the kind of people who use the phrase `software engineering' shake their heads disapprovingly." -- Paul Graham
