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

[Fred Kiefer]

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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