On Wednesday 2015-07-01 07:44, Home wrote:
The Board [found] that we tend to be the distribution of everyone doing everything,
How is this different from other distributions, like Debian? That one is essentially the classic do-everything-under-the-sun, judging from the historical number of packages.
and at the same time, being the distribution that does nothing and belongs to no one. Our aim seems lost and we must find it to gain strength and followers. [The board] defined the openSUSE’s areas of strength. They are tools, 2. The Board feels that a Developer audience, and maybe a System Administrator audience, is a strong focal point for our marketing. What are the strengths and weaknesses of approaching, via marketing, to these two main audiences?
See (6).
- What are the thoughts around the strength of a developer community versus other target audiences such as education, public service, finance, medicine, research, general public, non-technical users, gamers, etc? What are the merits of a developer community target as opposed to others?
Well, I can give some thoughts as to why we _do not actually_ reach them: Finance, public service: Often enterprisey on the server side, and only a few die-hards to use Linux desktop, it is mostly Windows. The public service sector is also quite messed up in Germany, e.g. Munich City, where they ordered a custom-built distro (IMO a waste of money). Education: Mostly a Windows world, sadly, because those people seem to not have "seen the light(s)" yet and they rely on some niche products, of course only available for Windows. In Germany, seems like a difficult audience to reach, for any Linux distro. Finance: Feels all enterprisey with SLE and RH. Not gonna reach them with what's top on distrowatch.org. Medicine/Research: I feel we have a lack of packages to reach certain scientificish audiences here. That which we offer is concentrated on math and physics, directly related to the jobs of people that put the software into our repos.
- The project is large and has a few diverse areas of focus. If we are targeting developers, should we keep or remove initiatives that do not align with the target audience in hopes that by concentrating efforts into one audience will produce a better outcome in the end? For example, why work on integrating so many desktop platforms when a developer might simply care to have support for specific languages, a command line, a text editor and a compiler?
DIY building facilitates, such as OBS, have allowed non-technical users to become "little developers" (and later perhaps experienced ones). openSUSE is built by its very own users, so the picture is skewed in that openSUSE _looks_ like all about development. That is to say, just because everyone tunes their car in the backyard does not suddenly make the residential area an industrial auto shop zone. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org