I don't want to start another brand rant, but we can only lay out the "promise" (what is it? what does it do? who cares?) of Fedora, the "experience" (how it's used, and by whom) is semantic, and evolutionary from this starting point. We can shape and/or react to the promise, but we'll never be able to magically anticipate it, and surely won't be able to control it. We can't tell Fedora what to be for everyone, we can't tell anyone what they should or shouldn't do with. We can, however, decide to never tell it what not to be--while deciding as a group the core purpose or *intended* use by *intended* audience.
Just as we make package choices, without inhibiting third parties from adding/subtracting their own.
We've answered these core questions about what Fedora is, and for whom a great number of times already on this list. Someone needs to digest it, and make a cut we can all vote on. And somone needs to call final cut at some point. Then, similar to the development of the logo, we can get a head of steam going and the folks at Red Hat--who know a thing or two about marketing Linux--can polish it up.
As for the purpose of Fedora marketing, it's to make more people use/hack Fedora more often, so we make it better more often than it gets worse. Just the same as that marketing in a commercial environment is to "get more people, to buy more stuff, more often, so you make more money". That's it. There's nothing more to it than technique.
Our metrics are the number of contributors (code, bugs, feedback, list posts), and number of users (hackers, enthusiasts, early adopters, those wanting insight into what RHEL might be)--which together make the target install base--and the number of articles, reviews and how-tos written about Fedora. That's not all the use cases and measures for Fedora, because we don't and never should know all the use cases, anymore than Apache foundation knows exactly what's going on on every web site running Apache.
For example, sometimes, we'll see that we are getting significant uptake in verticals like desktop productivity, or multimedia, or LiveCD variants. Or someone will write an article explaining how to shove Fedora onto a Mac mini, or XBox, or pen drive. Or some teacher in Portland will start a program targeting K12, based on Fedora. Or some VAR or IT support org will charge folks for support, customizations or maintenance. Etc.
User driven innovation, and an eco-sysem. In other words, a lot of what made Red Hat what it was before the RHEL/Fedora debbil scat.
Once we establish ourselves in the known universe, we have a baseline of metrics. And we can draw up a set of benchmarks and be more inquisitive and measure against those metrics, as well as reacting emerging segments.
--jeremy
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