The big What-Why-How

[Marc Wiriadisastra]

On Thu, 2005-09-08 at 20:43 -0400, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> On 9/8/05, Matt Frye <mattfrye at gmail.com> wrote:
> > While I have mixed feelings about pushing "open" as a benefit to end
> > users, 
> 
> Understanding the long term benefits of "open" is the hard one and yet
> the most important one for everybody's long term interests.  As long
> as people are concentrating on the next 3 minutes of their
> mass-marketted, throw-away, disposable materialistic consumer
> experience they call a life.. it will continue to be difficult for
> them to understand the benefits of "open" in any meaningful context.


Is there a way to explain the meaning of being "open" for example show
people how to play cd's using ogg for example.  Not sure about legality
though.  

Explaining that xvid is an open source initiative for compressions blah
blah.  

Explaining the security.  SELinux is used by such and such making it
more secure.  So we have like a summary with a link to lower down the
document explaining what it means to be secure.

Obviously keeping the KISS principle.  My reason for joining the Fedora
team was purely because I liked the latest things on my desktop.
However I can still see problems since I run multiple distro's for
certain reasons. I run ubuntu and fedora at the same time so I see the
difference.

For a new user ubuntu works because the majority of the time it seems to
work out of the box.  For the mature user Fedora performs better because
of the tinkering and the messing around that can be done more so and the
latest software that is not needed but wanted.

The only big hurdle for the 'semi' experienced user is the RPM compared
to deb as well as the difference related to that.

One difference that I noticed for example which isn't a bug report but a
comment.  RHEL sound works on my laptop, ubuntu sound works on my
desktop FC4 sound doesn't work?  Things like that now I have sound
working fine now because I've known what to fix but new users shake
their head and go thats just to hard. So we need to specify who are we
targeting.  If we are targeting new users to linux  then we need to make
sure that every amount of information that they would need they have
access to.  If we are targeting more experienced users they would need
the information in a different way.  Developers well they need
development information.  

I suppose it boils down to who is our target market in specifics.
Demographics, pschographics, locations and purely from a marketing point
of view we have to answer those questions first then we can create the
information to help those users.

Regards

Marc
P.S. You can tell I've been doing my marketing study for my company
lately.d