On Sunday 02 August 2015 11:46:14 Richard Brown wrote:
There's lots of reasons, we're a diverse community, but I would say one over-arching theme that is true for the vast majority of us is "we make openSUSE to make & use better technology"
Technology is a factor, but I'm sure that for the vast majority of us it is even more important to do something which matters, not technology for the sake of technology. We do want openSUSE to be used by people, we do want it to be recognized as relevant, we do want it to be popular. Our ambition is not to be a player in a small niche, but one of the dominant Linux distributions.
Embracing these realities and focusing the marketing of openSUSE accordingly is the concept the Board calls "The Makers Choice"
I perceive this as a very limiting concept. First thing is that it's confusing, because "maker" has a meaning coming from the maker movement. We could possibly address the maker movement, but I don't think we actually want to do this or would be in any particular good position to do so. The second thing is that it excludes all people who wouldn't consider themselves as makers. There are so many people who are technically interested, but still mostly use and consume technology not make them themselves, or who wouldn't consider what they do as making, even if we would. We do need to include passive users who are happy openSUSE users, but don't contribute yet. I do agree that we shouldn't address everybody, and that a technical audience suits us well. But I think this should be much broader than "makers". We have our strengths in the middle-ground between the real technical enthusiasts and the mass market end user. We provide a distribution which is slick and polished and has nice technical tools, so that a broad number of people can use it. We do require a bit of technical understanding, but not too much. I think this is actually a pretty good position, which can reach a lot of people. Let's not waste it.
More *contributors* mean we can build more, build better and find more people to help is build even more, and build even better.
Popular, attractive, growing, visible, relevant projects get contributors, not projects who want to have contributors for the sake of contributing. I think it's actually really simple. Do something with matters to users and contributors will naturally come.
And that's fine, great, and I look forward to that day - but lets spend the majority of our time and effort focusing where we get the most benefit, which in my opinion really means embracing the concept of 'The Makers Choice' and using it as a strong guide to direct our marketing efforts for the next years.
This will drive us into a rathole of irrelevance where only few people will
find us again. That's not where I want to be.
--
Cornelius Schumacher