Editorial on competition and choice

Nicu Buculei nicu_fedora at nicubunu.ro
Tue Sep 11 10:06:24 UTC 2007


Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay wrote:
> Nicu Buculei wrote:
>> And here I think lies the mistake: don't focus on future developers,
> 
> I thought you had written that today's fanboy is tomorrow's potential
> developer, however leaving that aside - what do you think would be a

Yes, but it should have been "contributor" instead of "developer"

> compelling reason for new users to choose Fedora or existing users (from
> other distributions) to shift to Fedora ?

To put it bluntly, for the most part people are sheep, they go with the 
herd. Usually a new user will look at the most popular distro and go 
with it, being afraid to be in the minority (you can argue, using Linux 
you already are in the minority, but you may not want to be in the 
smallest minority).

Another thing is to increase visibility. All of us should write more 
about our successes and accomplishments.

And we should not avoid competition. How we can expect users to come 
from other distros when our message is "we don't compete"? Competition 
is not war or a bad thing, she should be proud to say "we are better 
than distro X because our advantages are Y and Z"

> The Ambassadors normally emphasize the message that "no contribution is
> too small, even *you* can contribute" - however, as you pointed out this
> is not getting as much impact as it should have been. Given that we
> spend inordinate amounts of time going over "Fedora is losing ground
> ..." threads, there has to be either a truth to it or a perception bias.

We know for a fact the install count for F7 is about 80% compared with 
FC6, so far we have only these two counted, will be able to see a trend 
some time after the F8 release when we get more data.

> We have had Max (among others) saying that Fedora's contribution is
> projected to be more of a torchbearer and not the users per country
> kind. In short, we might need to look at the definition of popularity
> when it comes to Fedora. Accepting all that, how do you think we can
> also push the users/contributors per country count up since that appears
> to be how various external Linux sites claim to measure popularity ?

The thing is, usually developers follow the users. If the user base is 
shrinking, then proportionally the number of developers will shrink.

Here is an anecdotal example: recently on the Inkscape development 
mailing list recently was a talk about the date for the next release. 
The *only* distro that mattered in this talk was Ubuntu and when to 
release to get in Ubuntu (one or two years ago it was not the same). 
Why? my guess is: because developers are users too and the majority of 
Inkscape developers migrated from other distros to Ubuntu.


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