[Mageia-discuss] Mageia logo proposals and selection

Wolfgang Bornath molch.b at googlemail.com
Wed Oct 20 14:24:51 CEST 2010


2010/10/20 Michael Scherer <misc at zarb.org>:
>
> "Jeroen: One of the big, essential differences between Fedora and other
> distributions is that we’d rather gain one contributor than a dozen
> users. In fact, if I could lose 1000 users right now and gain a
> contributor, I’d do it. It’s not up to me, but if it were, I’d do it."

This seems to me a very short-sighted point of view. It may be right
if you start a project and you do not have enough contributors to get
it going at all. But for something where the basic number of
contributors is already available it's time to turn users into
committed users. Besides, the PR footwork done by a large user base is
cost-free and a powerful instrument. PR is as essential as
development. You can have the best product in the world but no success
if you have no PR (that was one of Mandriva's faults).

How are contributors become attracted to a new project? Besides other
means (fellow contributors, friends, etc.) they become attracted as
users. They look at the product from a user's point of view, they like
it and decide that this is something they want to spend some time,
sweat and tears on  (remembering the fact that contributors primarily
work to scratch their own itches with the project they like (IIRC it
was you who wrote that)). So, if you can find a contributor, fine. But
finding 1000 users bears the chance that there may be more than one
contributor or user-turns-contributor among them.

Yes, I agree, "the trick is balance".

-- 
wobo


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