Re: Idea

[Paul Seelig]

On Fri, Jan 05, 2001 at 12:25:21AM +0100, Dennis Leeuw wrote:

> Let's do some marketing
> Let's do some brand awareness
> 
Aargh... :-(

> What might be an idea to get more exposure for GNUstep is a shorter
> release cicle. Let's create some steps betweem 0.7.0, 0.7.5 and 0.8.0
> for marketing reasons only.
> 
The *only* and *best* marketing is to make it *work* and *useable* for
the average *user*.  Why should i (being an avarage user) bother about
GNUstep if it doesn't serve for getting *my* non-developer work done?

Users don't care about technical excellence and all the things
developers get a warm and cozy feeling with.  Users care about getting
*their* work done and it doesn't matter whether it's a GNOME/GTK+ app
or a QT/KDE app or a Motif app or one of all those other heterogeneous
apps of the *NIX world.  Why should any *user* bother about GNUstep if
it doesn't *serve* for anything worthwhile other than itself?

It's the *apps* that count and with apps i don't mean yet another mail
reader.  A nice contender for a killer app would be "Personal INN"
from "http://www.ritual.org/summer/pinn/";, which the author Uli Zappe
would love to see ported to GNUstep (if you read along here: is this
still true, Uli?), if the latter would be already up to the task.
Maybe someone competent would like to lend him a hand?

I'm one of those people who developed an interest in GNUstep over the
years.  I got hold of and (painfully!) installed NeXTSTEP to get a
slight idea about what GNUstep was supposed to end up with and i was
was pleasantly surprised about the possible future.  

But everytime i installed the (excellently done!) GNUstep Debian
packages, the only thing i could do was to play a little around with
some small sample apps.  And since the whole stuff was of no use for
practically anything worthwhile i regularily deleted it again from my
system.  No, i didn't try compiling any of the latest CVS versions or
any of the latest user space apps.

If GNUstep is destined to be succesful it *should* become *useable* by
average users and not only be a developers paradise.  It *should*
become integrated into any Linux/*BSD/you_name_it instead of making up
just another fringe *nix distribution.  It should be *able* to
interoperate in a world of heterogeneous applications including the
aforementioned GNOME/KDE/GTK+/QT/Motif/you_name_it instead of creating
just it's own isle of excellence nobody cares for in the real world.

If GNUstep is not part of e.g. the Linux distribution i use (Debian)
or someone else uses (Redhat) or the FreeBSD yet used by another it
won't become significantly accessable in any way.  I won't bother
install some kind of GNUstepified Linux system along my Debian just
for using GNUstep.

There is more to complain about from my user's point of view about
GNUstep but i'll better stop here.  Please just don't forget about
*users* or the project will stay as failed as it seems to be.

                                 Thank you, P. *8^)

PS: No, i don't use GNOME or KDE, but do use some assorted apps
related with these projects under WMaker.
-- 
   ------------ Paul Seelig <pseelig@mail.uni-mainz.de> -------------
   African Music Archive - Institute for Ethnology and Africa Studies
   Johannes Gutenberg-University   -  Forum 6  -  55099 Mainz/Germany
   ------------------- http://ntama.uni-mainz.de --------------------