Fedora review

Greg DeKoenigsberg gdk at redhat.com
Tue Jul 19 13:50:27 UTC 2005


On Tue, 19 Jul 2005, Christopher Aillon wrote:

> But obviously they weren't answered for the review author.  So there is
> a problem in our getting the message out.  What good is the wiki if its
> not helping our users?

Um, it's helping our developers?

I will agree that we need to do a better of job at answering questions
like "why doesn't Fedora do this or that?" and getting the word out.  But
the wiki is not necessarily the place to do that.

===

That said:

We've been arguing a lot about "what's our mission?"  And that mission, in 
a nutshell, is "to communicate important information about Fedora to 
users."

Here's some pretty important information:

* Fedora is cutting-edge, because it's the best way to innovate.
* Fedora is patent-free, because it's the RIGHT thing to do.

Specifically when it comes to the second message, I think we need to
promote the idea AGGRESSIVELY.  For instance:

"No audio?  Funny, there's an ogg player in Fedora, and I play audio just
fine with it.  Why aren't you using it?  Oh, because you're paying lip
service to the importance of open standards?  Ah, well then.  I suppose if
you have to have your mp3s, we'll never get anywhere as a community, now
will we?"

Of course, it's better if we can boil that down to a sentence.  How's this 
for some sloganeering?  They'd make good bumperstickers:

* FEDORA: PATENT-FREE SINCE 2003.
* MAKE OGG, NOT MP3.
* IF YOU DON'T BELIEVE IN SOFTWARE PATENTS, DON'T USE PATENTED SOFTWARE.

People won't get it until we hit them over the head with it.

--g

_____________________  ____________________________________________
  Greg DeKoenigsberg ] [ the future masters of technology will have
 Community Relations ] [ to be lighthearted and intelligent.  the
             Red Hat ] [ machine easily masters the grim and the 
                     ] [ dumb.  --mcluhan




More information about the Fedora-marketing-list mailing list