Hi!
First of all, thank's again for the work done on the new ISOs!
Being a (power) user and not a developer I have some ideas I would like
to share. They might be way of, but then again, they also might be spot
on...
I would like to begin by addressing two large groups of users whom
should fit the Foresight target audience perfectly.
First we have the tech savy crown that aren't developers, that is not
programmers. I believe this group often gets overlooket because it's
harder to get them to contribute, but that doesn't mean the never will
contribute. Take network technicians as an example. They know the
different CLI for Cisco, Juniper, HP, Nortel (Avaya), Alcatel and so on
and these are people that would absolutely love Conary if they knew that
a Linux distribution based on Conary existed.
Then we have mature users. I apologize if that word might be interpreted
differently outside of Sweden, but what I mean is that you reach a
certain point, lets say 30+ years old, when you most likely have other
obligations in life taking priority over your inner most desires to run
the perfect operating system on your computer. These users probably are
the tech support for the entire family, including distans relatives and
friends.
Both groups described are not the target users for any Linux
distribution I know, and believe me I've tried many of them. Foresight
might be the exeption. You need a stable system as secure as possible
and you do not want to reinstall your computer every six months - and
absolutely no time to help all friends and relative reinstall their
computers. And for buisness users that's just silly really, because when
are you suposed to reinstall your computer? At work during business
hours? That's time well spent not being able to bill your customers... I
believe Foresight Linux would fit professionals just as well as home users.
The users I describe need an operating system that
1. just works and
2. will continue working with as low maintanence as possible.
If you are tech savy the chanses are you will love Conary! I know I do...
If Foresight aims at these groups much of the marketing will take care
of itself, because these users will be able to help other users get
started with Foresight - and even if the first group will not become
Foresight develepers maybe someone in the second wave will.
And speaking of marketing... Many of the users I describe above are
active on LinkedIn, but the two Foresight groups are quite dead I'm
afraid. I've been trying to become a member of both groups for months
and that's not really the way to get new users feel welcome in the
community. So my advice is taking ownership of those two LinkedIn groups
and make sure everyone trying to become a member at least gets a proof
of life (there a push on a like button on a post in those groups will
broadcast a message to all your contacts witch makes for a much more
personal and thrustworthy indirect marketing), or else they might become
Ubuntu users whether they want to or not...
// Roger
2013-04-14 01:36, Rune Morling skrev:
So,
Roelof's recent cry for help re. porting Cinnamon strikes me as yet
another data point in the mounting evidence pointing to the fact that
we clearly do need to come together -- sooner rather than later -- in
the name of focusing our efforts on assembling an easier to maintain
base system (the so-far-mostly-mythical FL3).
I personally suspect that, in the course of doing so, we would do well
to take a long, hard look at what we are and come to a sensible,
sustainable decision about what we want to be, where we want to go,
where we want to provide value and where we simply want to be e.g. a
co-operative and pragmatic derivative of another distribution.
As far as target audience goes, I could see us catering to someone who
wants a reasonably sane base from which to build custom re-spins which
again take advantage of the capabilities that Conary offers in terms
of software life-cycle management -- especially now that Conary is
being/has been re-licensed under a business-friendly, permissive
license. I also don't see us competing with neither Ubuntu nor Fedora
and their ilk and I think we would do well to flat out admit that we
don't have the resources to keep chasing that particular pipe dream.
In my view, what we need to focus on is the niche where the
"intelligent developer" roams, the developer who needs to manage many
machines with few resources and is thus essentially forced to work
smarter than what is possible with the tools offered by existing
distributions. In that niche, Conary is a strong selling point, as is
a high degree of similarity to a well known and widely used
distribution such as fedora.
Michael recently made some edits to the Foresight Linux Development
page on the wiki[1], which are IMHO very much in step with the reality
of what FL is and has been for the past couple of years. Prior to
Michael's edit, the wording in the Goals section on that page was
something I originally adapted from what is probably best described as
"grand visions from the past". And my wording was a *very*
conservative version of that grand vision.
So, in summary, scaling back our ambitions and aggressively honing our
focus on our core mission might just be what the doctor ordered for FL
to thrive in its niche-within-a-niche going forward.
Or in the timeless words of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:
"Perfection is Achieved Not When There Is Nothing More to Add, But
When There Is Nothing Left to Take Away"
-Rune
[1]:
http://wiki.foresightlinux.org/wiki/display/DEV/Foresight+Linux+Development
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