[Mageia-dev] Identifying Target Markets

Fri Oct 1 00:43:13 CEST 2010

Le vendredi 01 octobre 2010 à 00:28 +0300, P. Christeas a écrit :
+> On Thursday 30 September 2010, Michael Scherer wrote:
+> > Le jeudi 30 septembre 2010 à 22:05 +0800, Kira a écrit :
+> > > "A distribution for Newbie" is good, but I think what Graham said is
+> > > better.
+> > 
+> > Well,
+> > saying "a distribution for newbies" is not as good as it sound.
+> > 
+> > If you market the distribution so people think "if you are a newbie, use
+> > this distro", people will think "he use this distribution so he is a
+> > newbie". ...
+> > 
+> > In turn, this mean a diminution of the global expertise in the
+> > community....
+> 
+> ++
+> What about the "easy to learn distro" as a concept?
+
+Yup, the distro that make you become expert, something like that.
+
+One thing we must not forget is that we need people that contribute if
+we want to survive. A commercial distribution requires money ( and
+therefore users that can bring money , either directly, or either
+indirectly ( service, ads, etc )) to survive. We are not a commercial
+distribution, so the pressure is lower with regard to money. But we
+still to have people that develop it, and if we cannot pay people for
+that directly ( since we are not a company, even if maybe some companies
+will help us later ), we need to directly use contributions as a way to
+ensure our own sustainability.
+
+SO IMHO, this is what we should seek if we want to survive. Gathering
+contributions should be one of our goals.
+
+The second point is that we are here because we want community
+empowerment. So community also must be a strong point, especially since
+it will appeal to people that would allow the community to survive.
+
+So again, I think that empowerment should be another one of the goals.
+
+Now, we must ask ourself "what is pushing people to contribute".
+There is various papers, like this one
+http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1113/1033 
+
+( I let the analysis as a exercise for the moment ).
+
+And we need to find a way to combine this with others goals. 
+
+While a traditional motivation in free software is to solve our own
+problem ( and that's also part of community empowerment ), this is not
+enough. We also need to think to more than us. And I think that's the
+complex part.
+
+We have 2 choices. Either we try to find a market where no one went, or
+a market where someone went, and try to be better. Or maybe both.
+
+-- 
+Michael Scherer
+
+