diff options
Diffstat (limited to 'zarb-ml/mageia-dev/20101001/000537.html')
| -rw-r--r-- | zarb-ml/mageia-dev/20101001/000537.html | 166 |
1 files changed, 166 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/zarb-ml/mageia-dev/20101001/000537.html b/zarb-ml/mageia-dev/20101001/000537.html new file mode 100644 index 000000000..67e3e42eb --- /dev/null +++ b/zarb-ml/mageia-dev/20101001/000537.html @@ -0,0 +1,166 @@ +<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN"> +<HTML> + <HEAD> + <TITLE> [Mageia-dev] Identifying Target Markets + </TITLE> + <LINK REL="Index" HREF="index.html" > + <LINK REL="made" HREF="mailto:mageia-dev%40mageia.org?Subject=Re%3A%20%5BMageia-dev%5D%20Identifying%20Target%20Markets&In-Reply-To=%3C4CA53E7C.5080204%40roadrunner.com%3E"> + <META NAME="robots" CONTENT="index,nofollow"> + <META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=us-ascii"> + <LINK REL="Previous" HREF="000533.html"> + <LINK REL="Next" HREF="000539.html"> + </HEAD> + <BODY BGCOLOR="#ffffff"> + <H1>[Mageia-dev] Identifying Target Markets</H1> + <B>Frank Griffin</B> + <A HREF="mailto:mageia-dev%40mageia.org?Subject=Re%3A%20%5BMageia-dev%5D%20Identifying%20Target%20Markets&In-Reply-To=%3C4CA53E7C.5080204%40roadrunner.com%3E" + TITLE="[Mageia-dev] Identifying Target Markets">ftg at roadrunner.com + </A><BR> + <I>Fri Oct 1 03:50:52 CEST 2010</I> + <P><UL> + <LI>Previous message: <A HREF="000533.html">[Mageia-dev] What do you think about create a Mageia Welcome Center? +</A></li> + <LI>Next message: <A HREF="000539.html">[Mageia-dev] Identifying Target Markets +</A></li> + <LI> <B>Messages sorted by:</B> + <a href="date.html#537">[ date ]</a> + <a href="thread.html#537">[ thread ]</a> + <a href="subject.html#537">[ subject ]</a> + <a href="author.html#537">[ author ]</a> + </LI> + </UL> + <HR> +<!--beginarticle--> +<PRE>Graham Lauder wrote: +><i> In a phrase: Horse Doo doo +</I>[....] + +><i> Mageia has a donation system +</I>><i> +</I> +[....] +><i> We do this because at the end of the day infrastructure costs, marketing +</I>><i> costs, a whole pile of things cost. One day some patch or application, which +</I>><i> is essential but completely non-sexy could require us to pay a dev on contract +</I>><i> and so on and so forth. +</I>><i> +</I>><i> Now our problem is that in these days of "everything free off the Internet" +</I>><i> getting Koha is problematic. However there is, obviously, a proportion of the +</I>><i> market that is willing to give Koha. That proportion in a market is generally +</I>><i> but arguably fixed, so the bigger the market the greater the Koha. Our +</I>><i> advantage is that our "costs" vary little with the size of the market. +</I>><i> +</I> +I'm not exactly ignorant of Economics 101, having been in this business +(on the commercial side) for about 35 years. :-) + +You make my point exactly. The infrastructure costs are fixed, and the +donor pool will be larger if the user base is larger. You can either +choose to entice people to donate because of their perception of the +slant (market vision) of the distro, or you can entice people to donate +because they find the distro useful to them personally (otherwise known +as pseudo-shareware). If you narrow the audience using the former +approach, you're excluding potential contributors. I was a member of +Mandriva Club for years because I thought Mandriva worth supporting; I +never bought a PowerPack or a Box Set because I never needed that +stuff. If MDV had trumpeted itself as a KDE-only Family (or Education, +or whatever) distro, and reinforced that by excluding packages and +infrastructure support for other stuff, I wouldn't have given a dime. + + +><i> There is already a way of doing that, it's called OBS (OpenSUSE Build service, +</I>><i> it's free software, install it or in fact use it) and with that and SUSE +</I>><i> Studio, OpenSUSE have that corner of the market targeted and nailed. +</I>><i> +</I> +Except that they don't have the tools that we have. The software +packages are common to every distro. The tools aren't. The key to +whether someone would use OBS or ours (or even OBS ported to use our +packages) is the quality of the packages (currency, stability) and the +quality of the distro tools. +"Focus" is all about excluding "non-essential" activities so that a +company can focus its limited resources on the desires of a specific +market. A community distro is about servicing the largest possible +community and providing a base from which others (including ourselves) +can specialize. The assumption is that the community will supply the +manpower needed to achieve the objectives they want achieved, and if you +think that the potential developer contributor pool gives a rat's +whatever about targeted "image" distros that don't satisfy their +specific needs, then you don't know developers. And I would seriously +question the assumption that 20-something families looking for commodity +computing are going to become a significant donor base; that might +happen if they were required to pay for it up front, and if their desire +to buy it was great enough, but if they can get it and install it for +free, they're outta there after that. Your contributions are going to +come from people who have a longer-term view or an investment in the +health of the distro. + +Cheers, +Frank +</PRE> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +<!--endarticle--> + <HR> + <P><UL> + <!--threads--> + <LI>Previous message: <A HREF="000533.html">[Mageia-dev] What do you think about create a Mageia Welcome Center? +</A></li> + <LI>Next message: <A HREF="000539.html">[Mageia-dev] Identifying Target Markets +</A></li> + <LI> <B>Messages sorted by:</B> + <a href="date.html#537">[ date ]</a> + <a href="thread.html#537">[ thread ]</a> + <a href="subject.html#537">[ subject ]</a> + <a href="author.html#537">[ author ]</a> + </LI> + </UL> + +<hr> +<a href="https://www.mageia.org/mailman/listinfo/mageia-dev">More information about the Mageia-dev +mailing list</a><br> +</body></html> |