I've finally started making a poster for LinuxTag. :-)
And I think I may have a seed of a good "Imagine Freedom!" marketing
campaign for that and other venues.
Obviously I'm working in English, though I think this concept probably
would work in German and probably many other languages as well. You
might have to reverse the order of the words in some of them.
It's pretty common to appeal to concepts like "Imagination" for things
like 3D graphics -- especially when the target audience is artists,
designers, and engineers. Since OGD1 doesn't necessarily appeal to the
"entertain me/shake my teeth and dazzle my eyes" crowd of gamers, these
creative professionals are the primary market segment for OGD1 (and
probably OGC1 as well). Such professionals are more likely to be
interested in the flexibility and availability of the card on their
preferred platform than on the speed issues that interest gamers. Pros
are used to working with "pre-vis". (And of course, pros are about the
only people who can afford this thing).
There is another appeal with the OGD1 card, in that, as a general
purpose FPGA development platform, it is an open-ended product which can
be put to other "imaginative" uses. So "IMAGINE" is a great single-word
suggestion of the OGD1's technical value proposition.
The other selling point is that the platform provides a great deal of
FREEDOM, in both the FSF sense of free-licensed design and in the
pragmatic sense that, as an FPGA card, you have a great deal of freedom
to apply it to special uses: with OGD1 you get the FSF's "Four Freedoms"
to a very high degree.
And, then of course, the combined expression "IMAGINE FREEDOM!" proposes
the overall mission of the Open Graphics Project and Open Hardware in
general -- that we are imagining a world of free hardware projects which
will liberate users from the bounds of corporate cartels' control.
I think this sends the right message on several levels, and refocuses
the presentation on filling market needs, rather than simply tallying
engineering features of the product.
So I propose to arrange the words so that from a distance the ad simply
reads "IMAGINE FREEDOM!" and then, associated with each word is a detail
of the ways the OGD1 both provides "ways to IMAGINE" and "FREEDOM provided".
Which is why I'm writing -- I'm hoping you can help me answer the
questions (I'm providing my existing answers to be edited/added to):
1) What "imaginative" things can you do with OGD1?
* Use Open Graphics Architecture to provide a Linux-friendly
hardware accelerated 3D graphics card which serves desktop
environment, CAD, and design needs. (E.g. Blender, BRL-CAD,
new KDE and Gnome features, etc)
* Use FPGA to create custom ... what? Laboratory interfaces?
Sound card? What are you all drooling in anticipation for?
:-)
2) In what ways is the OGD1 "free"?
* OGA has free, open-source Verilog, which runs on OGD1 FPGA
(OGD1 is a platform for a free soft GPU? Is "GPU" the right
word here?)
* The PCB design is under GPL
* The design implements open interfaces (with the possible
exception of the PCI interface itself, which we must
accomodate in order to work on PCs -- OHF is considering
addressing this with a "platform exemption" like the way
the FSF lets you get away with using Windows DLLs that
are "part of the O/S")
* E.g. it implement OpenGL (or at least part of it?)
* Because it's an FPGA, you can reprogram it (do you "reprogam"
an FPGA, or is there a better word to use here?) to do other
tasks the designers may not have thought about, or to design
novel new graphics capabilities -- like the ray tracer or
CPU approaches that some people have suggested on list
* By purchasing an OGD1 you are *contributing* to freedom for
all free software users by subsidizing further development
and/or by directly contributing to the design and testing of
a free graphics environment for free software.
So, refinements to these points would be good (not fine editing -- I can
make it more concise -- I'm looking for points I've missed that should
be mentioned).
It's actually okay that the "IMAGINE" list is shorter than the "FREEDOM"
list, because the technical specs will go mostly under the IMAGINE
section (except for the specs of interest to FPGA developers).
BTW: I know that some posters have already been prepared for OGP. This
is in no way intended to replace them, but rather to be used alongside
them. I'm focusing on marketing the actual OGD1 card.
Cheers,
Terry
--
Terry Hancock ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com
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