[Mageia-discuss] Mageia logo proposals and selection

Marc Paré marc at marcpare.com
Wed Oct 20 21:55:10 CEST 2010


Le 2010-10-20 07:15, Michael Scherer a écrit :
> Le mercredi 20 octobre 2010 à 14:26 +1300, Graham Lauder a écrit :
>> On Tuesday 19 Oct 2010 11:38:39 Michael Scherer wrote:
>>> Le mardi 19 octobre 2010 à 09:06 +1300, Graham Lauder a écrit :
>>>> On Tuesday 19 Oct 2010 04:27:29 Frank Griffin wrote:
>>>>> In FOSS, it doesn't.  If enough people agree with your objective, you
>>>>> may find that you have enough critical mass to produce a derived distro
>>>>> with a face and personality which matches your objectives.
>>>>
>>>> This is one of the interesting elements of FOSS marketing that I've
>>>> talked about in the past.  That Marketing department, which in a
>>>> corporate world always has the ear of management more so than the
>>>> Development people simply because of human interaction capabilities, has
>>>> to turn it's focus inward.  The problem is, an one I've been trying to
>>>> avoid here, is that it becomes insular to the exclusion of all else and
>>>> then the community stagnates and spirals into irrelevancy.  For the
>>>> community to grow there has to be a dynamism, (and I'm talking grow in
>>>> terms of the community of contributors)  Userland is the big billboard
>>>> of that dynamism.  Ubuntu for all it's faults and annoyances has taught
>>>> us one thing, high visibility in Userland attracts contributors.
>>>
>>> Then what Fedora and Debian has taught us ?
>>>
>>> Because AFAIK there is also lots of contributors in Fedora, as there is
>>> in Debian, and I think they didn't really choose the high visibility
>>> path to get them. So I do not think we can really find a direct
>>> correlation between "ubuntu has lots of users" and "there is lots of
>>> contribution".
>>
>>
>> Debian is an interesting case in viral marketing in a highly interconnected
>> demographic.  I always remember the "OMG we have a new release!" that used to
>> race round the maillists and Usergroups.  It never really had a market share,
>> rather it had almost a monopoly in its chosen demographic.  It is deliberately
>> eclectic and famously stubborn and being part of the community is as important
>> as the software itself, I mean he named it after his wife and himself, Deb and
>> Ian, how cool is that. It was just that attitude that endeared it to it's
>> chosen community and good on them.  Slackware and Gentoo have a similar ethic.
>> And more power to them.  It wasn't until Ubuntu came along that Debian gained
>> much in the way of widespread traction.  However it was it's obsession with
>> stability that attracted the Mark. They could afford to break things because
>> they had this super stable backstop, but at the end of the day, Debian counts
>> the Ubuntu user as it's community, I would be interested to know how many more
>> developers Debian picked up in the wake of Ubuntu's popularity, I certainly
>> know quite a few.  Certainly HPs support was post Ubuntu startup
>>
>> Fedora has the benefit of age, being around a long time and focusing in the
>> corporate space is a good way to lift profile in your preferred market.   I
>> don't have any figures unfortunately but I would suspect many came from Red
>> Hat sites.
>>
>> In any case, both are in fact very small in terms of the whole desktop market
>> and even in terms of all developers.
>
> Small in term of direct users, but they are the one with the more
> contributers, and therefor, the one that are likely to survive in the
> long term. And while it is not a stated goal of Mageia, I hope it is
> obvious to everybody that we ( aka the founders ) forked the project
> because we wanted it to survive in case of problem on Mandriva side.
>
> If we look at the number of contributers in the overall free software
> distribution community. I think that Debian and Fedora are one of the
> biggest one.
>
> The fedora account system tell me there is 21000 members in the group of
> people who signed the contributer level agreement ( CLA ), around 1100
> in the packager group, around 100 in the marketing group. I suspect that
> opening a account is required to edit the wiki or something like that,
> hence the high number of accounts.
>
> A quick search on debian ldap directory ( ldapsearch -x -H
> ldap://db.debian.org -b ou=users,dc=debian,dc=org
> '(objectClass=debianAccount)' ) tell me there is around 1650 accounts,
> which roughly translate to the same number of packagers for the time
> being.
>
> Ubuntu "only" have 650 people in the ubuntu-member group
> ( https://launchpad.net/~ubuntumembers ), which is a superset of the
> various groups. There is 160 people who can upload to Universe ( ie,
> their version of what mandriva called "contribs" )
> ( https://launchpad.net/~universe-contributors ), and there was 970 who
> subscribed to have their packages reviewed
> ( https://launchpad.net/~revu-uploaders ).
>
> When you compare to the 3000 people who committed to gnome since the
> beggining ( source, gnome census of Dave Neary ), the 500 currently
> active contributers of kde
> ( http://www.kdenews.org/2009/07/14/growth-metrics-kde-contributors ) or
> the 700 who contributed to 2.6.20 ( http://lwn.net/Articles/222773/ ),
> you see the number are not much different.
>
> So while they may be small in term of market of users, they are the one
> who successfully attracted some of the biggest community of
> contributers.
>
> And attracting contributors is the key of the sustainability we should
> aim.
>
>>>
>>> My own opinion is that Canonical pay 5 people full time to take care of
>>> the community growth
>>> ( http://www.jonobacon.org/2010/07/26/the-five-horsemen/ ), and that's
>>> the main reason for contribution from outsiders.
>>
>> Tsk a badly dressed marketing team  ;)
>
> Nope.
> The team of Jono have been quite concerned with organisation ( see the
> various track at UDS ), they produced some code to help on various level
> ( acire, python-snippet ), wrote some documentations ( for the various
> community process ) and they also try to act as mediator ( see Jono
> book, chapter 9 ) when there is a conflict.
>
> This IMHO exceed the scope of a marketing team.
>
>
>>   I'm not denying that marketing  to
>> bring in Code Contributors is a necessary thing and in fact we've already
>> identified this group as our initial, primary target market, however the fact
>> that Ubuntu is high profile out in the market place gives Jono and crew a hell
>> of a lot more leverage to bring in new talent.
>
> They do not seem to attract so much new talent, if we look at the
> metrics I gave before. Or at least, they are not more successful that
> Fedora or Gentoo ( back in the day when Gentoo was all the rage, some
> years ago in 2005 ). Of course, they are more successful than we were in
> Mandriva, so that's not bad either.
>
>
>>> The same goes for
>>> Fedora and Redhat
>>> ( http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/CommunityArchitecture )
>>
>> It's interesting that you point to that URL, I'm a big believer in the Biology
>> of Community that the Fedora guys talk about.
>>
>> The principle idea behind it is that once a community reaches a critical mass
>> it becomes self sustaining, in the case of the Mageia community that would be
>> the point where you could remove all of the founders from the mix and it would
>> keep going.
>>
>> To me that requires a whole community, it is a holistic beast.  Yes you can
>> continue a community that rides on the coat tails of a single person or core
>> group but is it self sustaining.
>>
>> Fedora has reached this point I think and would continue if RedHat was removed
>> from the equation.
>
> Time may tell us sooner than we think.
>
>>   Would Ubuntu continue without Shuttleworth and Canonical,
>> I'm not sure, but I reckon they are a long way toward it.  OOo wasn't, but
>> LibreOffice has the opportunity to be.  Debian, I don't know the community
>> well enough to comment.
>
> There was a point were the Debian infrastructure was almost forked some
> years ago, according to a story I heard in Zurich ( but I do not have
> public source ). And there was also the old rumors of a Debian fork in
> 2003 ( http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2003/08/msg00389.html ),
> which may have lead or be fueled by the creation of Ubuntu at that time.
>
>
>> The point is that community goes right across the spectrum of users
>> Not enough of the community at the User end of the spectrum is as untenable as
>> not enough at the Makers end.  The trick is balance, that's what the Fedora
>> project has taught us
>
> Then the balance decided by Fedora is not really in favor of people in
> the User end, if we look at this interview :
> http://howsoftwareisbuilt.com/2008/12/21/interview-with-jeroen-van-meeuwen-fedora-project-vice-president-fedora-emea/
>
> "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."
>

Thanks Michael for this insightful post. I found most interesting the 
numbers of contributors working on different distros and as usual the 
call to attract more contributors to the Mageia project which I can tell 
you is finally sinking in with some of us.

We are hearing you (contributors) and are listening.

Marc



More information about the Mageia-discuss mailing list