Re: A niche for the Hurd - next step: reality check

[olafBuddenhagen]

Hi,

On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 05:05:54PM +0100, Arne Babenhauserheide wrote:
> Am Mittwoch 29 Oktober 2008 12:16:58 schrieb olafBuddenhagen@gmx.net:

> > And when the development is done, the really hard part will begin:
> > Pushing it to the "masses". 
> 
> Careful with that thought! 

I put it in quotation marks for a reason: It's not to be taken
literally! :-)

I only meant making it easily available to the "masses" of people toying
with the Hurd...

> To get and _keep_ the masses we only need to push it to a niche, and
> grab that. The masses don't readily give us more developers. The niche
> provides real-life applications which can be used as showcase for the
> next step. 
> 
> The masses are the big goal, but they can be "conquered" in many
> smaller steps. 

Indeed, hold the believe myself that it's not useful for a voluntary
software development project to explicitely try catering for the masses,
i.e. average users.

It just doesn't make sense. A project catering for the masses *might*
eventually attract developers, simply be being very popular in general
-- but for that, it must already by *extremely* popular; which in turn
means a lot of polish and cool stuff needs to be implemented -- however,
that won't happen unless already having a lot of develepers...

Catering to hackers makes so much more sense. Hackers are much more able
to appreciate new ideas, and much more willing to accept an unpolished
solutions. And hackers directly contribute to make it more attractive --
eventually perhaps even to the average users.

Yet another thing on my "meant to blog about" list...

It's the one thing the Ballmer ape actually got right: developers,
developers, developers, developers, developers, ... ;-)

-antrik-