Re: Objective-C 2.0 and other new features in Leopard

[Gregory John Casamento]

Fred,

I agree that we need to market ourselves better.  But that is only part of the 
equation.  Like I said earlier applications and other improvements are the key. 
 Perhaps the ultimate solution is a mixture of all of these: marketing+a better 
web presence+improvements in GNUstep itself.

> We, that is GNUstep, need to make a better impression on the "market".
> We are all lot better then how GNUstep is perceived. Now that a fresh
> release of GNUstep is out, will it be on /. or LWN? Most likely not.

As far as being on /. all I know is that when I did the Gorm 1.0 release, I 
posted about 10 times in 10 different ways to try and get it on the /. front 
page.   When I wrote Rob Malda his response was the he didn't think that 
putting news about a project that only about 10% of people out there use was 
really useful.   The one that did finally get posted was way out in left field 
and didn't come from me...    Here it is: 
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/02/1354255. Rob Malda posted it 
because he thought it was funny, I know because I asked him.  So, after 10 
tries from myself and other tries from other people... what gets posted... an 
article which makes us look bad.

Slashdot, as far as I'm concerned, is a GNOME and KDE dominated site.  They are 
not interested in, nor do they want to here about anything else other than 
GNOME and KDE.   Anything which challenges GNOME and KDE, in their view must be 
comprised of fools.   And, while I don't take an "us vs. them" attitude, I do 
feel that the /. crowd does us more harm than good because they don't seem to 
get GNUstep at all.   The best sites for us to post about GNUstep releases on 
are: osnews.com and LWN.  

> I like the idea of a GNUstep slogan, "GNUstep Code differently" sound
> great to me. Of course a slogan alone wont change anything. We should
> try to get GNUstep packages into mainstream releases, I am thinking of
> Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSuse here. For OpenSuse I know that
 there
> are special servers available to create packages for the system, but
 who
> is going to take over this task?

I agree and I've said this over and over again.

> As usual this is the main problem with GNUstep, we don't have enough
> people taking over responsibilities. Here even small change would make
 a
> big difference.

This problem feeds into the others and vice-versa.  What this means is that we 
need to focus our efforts on what is most important.

Later, GJC
--
Gregory Casamento -- OLC, Inc 
# GNUstep Chief Maintainer

----- Original Message ----
From: Fred Kiefer <fredkiefer@gmx.de>
Cc: Discuss GNUstep <discuss-gnustep@gnu.org>
Sent: Saturday, November 10, 2007 3:55:17 PM
Subject: Re: Objective-C 2.0 and other new features in Leopard

Sorry for top posting, but surely you all have read the previous mails
and I just wanted to state how much I agree with them.

We, that is GNUstep, need to make a better impression on the "market".
We are all lot better then how GNUstep is perceived. Now that a fresh
release of GNUstep is out, will it be on /. or LWN? Most likely not.

But this is not due to a bad world (Apple, KDE, Gnome or who else)
trying to keep us out, it mostly is our own fault. GNUstep seems to be
hiding itself. Here some more activity on the web site would really
help. The new release is not even on our own main page. What can we
expect from others.

I like the idea of a GNUstep slogan, "GNUstep Code differently" sound
great to me. Of course a slogan alone wont change anything. We should
try to get GNUstep packages into mainstream releases, I am thinking of
Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSuse here. For OpenSuse I know that
 there
are special servers available to create packages for the system, but
 who
is going to take over this task?

As usual this is the main problem with GNUstep, we don't have enough
people taking over responsibilities. Here even small change would make
 a
big difference.

Cheers,
Fred


Stefan Bidigaray wrote:
> On Nov 10, 2007 10:43 AM, Jesse Ross <gnustep@jesseross.com
> <mailto:gnustep@jesseross.com>> wrote:
> 
>     Call me cynical, but coming up with a slogan doesn't really seem
 like
>     a solution to the issues that we're having. We need developers,
 plain
>     and simple. In order to get developers, we need positive
 exposure.
>     That's not going to happen by pushing what amounts to marketing-
>     speak. Positive exposure is only going to come from building
>     powerful, innovative applications that make use of GNUstep. We
 need,
>     to put it bluntly, "killer apps".
> 
> 
> I agree, but this is one of those the chicken and the egg problems.
  In
> order for a developer to want to write a killer app for GNUstep,
 GNUstep
> must have a large user base, but in order for GNUstep to have a large
> user base there must be a kill app.
> 
> Psychologically, a slogan is a must.  There's a reason why every
 company
> has a marketing department.
> 
> You're also assuming people even know what GNUstep is.  Every time
> GNUstep does something news worth (like a new release posted on
 OSNews)
> someone writes something along the lines: "GNUstep has a new release,
> great, I've been using WindowMaker for years and love it."  As far as
> most people know, GNUstep doesn't even exist.
> 
> Obviously a slogan isn't going to do anything on it's own, but if you
> think about it, it's just a phrase, how hard would it be to edit the
> current logo to include it?
> 
> 
>     If you build something that people want to install, users will
 show
>     up to work around deficiencies: packaging, porting, etc. New
 users
>     will make it easier for themselves, which makes it easier for
 others,
>     which causes an ecosystem to grow around it. I would guess that
 Ruby
>     (and Ruby's marketshare and mindshare) has been improved as a
 result
>     of Rails being the "Next Big Thing". GNUstep will only get into
 that
>     position by having unique, desirable applications built using it.
 
> 
> 
> The problem here is that you're assuming people don't want to use
 GNUstep.
> 
> _______________________________
> 
> I just got Greg's e-mail, so I'll comment on that as well... I agree
> with almost everything he said, most notably the theming issue which
> comes up every time this type of discussion arise.
> 
> In my opinion, lack of marketing is one of the reason people think
> GNUstep is hard to install.  The fact that, as Greg mentioned, people
> think GNUstep is "hard to install" is unbelievable for the reasons he
> outlined.  But in reality, this is not what people consider
> "installing".  To most Unix users, "installing software" is
 associated
> with "installing packages", which is a lot easier.  They think, all I
> have to do to install GTK is "apt-get install libgtk2.0-0
 libgtk2.0-dev"
> to have a complete GTK development environment, so downloading and
> compiling GNUstep is too hard since I have to check for dependencies,
> library headers, etc.
> 
> Packaging software, as far as the "hard to install" issue goes, is
 the
> key.  And outdated packages only hurt, it better to have no packages
> than old packages for a particular platform (as in the Debian
 packages'
> case).
> 
> Stefan
> 
> 
>
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