[Mageia-dev] Identifying Target Markets

[Michael Scherer]

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