Hello everyone, First, I would like to wish you all Happy New Year 2009 with my best wishes. Happy reading as well :) == Abstract == Xuropa, a new company offering online virtual trade shows for the EDA community, will be offering Fedora an "Online Lab" space for FEL. This "Online Lab" package ( the most expensive package ) will be free for Fedora and Xuropa will offer a paypal addon where people can donate to Fedora. Asking Fedora Board's approval to procede. == About Xuropa == Xuropa is a new company focussing on building an online EDA community around commercial and opensource EDA tools. With its platform, the community can evaluate different tools, give presentations about one's EDA software and identify the most appropriate software for his/her design methodology. http://xuropa.com http://clunixchit.blogspot.com/2008/12/professional-marketing-strategy-for-eda.html == About the Online Lab == This youtube video describes the "Online Lab" package and how a subscribed user can acess FEL on Xuropa http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yDZnAPI-nw&feature=related Among the 4 packages (Online Kiosk,Online Booth,Online Suite and Online Lab), Online Lab is the most expensive in accordance to: http://www.xuropa.com/zone_restricted.php?zone_id=51 This package includes : # Secure invite-only access to your products # Remote product beta-testing # Remote product training # Remote product evaluations The above video demonstrate what "remote" here means and how training and beta testing can be carried out. There will be no FEL download from Xuropa's website. == Marketing == With our FEL LiveDVD, we - bring electronic engineers/students closer to opensource community - do marketing for our upstream projects such as gEDA/gaf, opencircuitdesign,pharosc, perl-verilog*,.. - .... Now with this Online Lab we can bring FEL to the "next level" and give upstream more chances to post their papers and do presentations via FEL. Xuropa's platform simulate an online conference hall. In other words like it is like an event /forum, but online. Every exhibitor has its booth(with a fee) and presentation, but online to help networking between ASIC engineers. Though, with this exhibition strategy, I am obeying all Fedora ground rules, I'm requesting again the usage of Fedora trademark to market fedora and its packages. Thereby, I also like to precise there will only be packages approved and built on our dear koji. As you know, my intention about FEL is NOT about packaging electronics tools for fedora, but to centralize(in fedora) _most_ electronic tools to create design flows for micro-nano electronics and help opensource developers to improve and distribute their tools with respect to electronic industry trends. Thereby this means encourage upstreams to communicate with other upstreams and help them market their software for the real world. In the electronics world, opensource EDA tools we have are far from the professional environment where huge companies spend billions of dollars in research and development. Hence with Xuropa, FEL enters the big world of electronics where those multi-billions EDA vendors are, to give our upstream projects room to market themselves through FEL. == Donation feature == Xuropa's cofounder proposes a "donation" paypal feature for which they will take a percentage of it. I'm ok with it. My question is, is Fedora Board you ok with it ? They would then collect funds and wire to "us" 85% of the proceeds after expenses (paypal's and hardware and license costs). This may not be very much to start, but it will build over time. However, if we are lucky, I guess we will get $100. I nominate MaxSpevack to be in charge of all money transaction, since he manages Fedora's budget already. IF we do happen to get lucky, maybe it would be nice to use "Fedora Scholarship" to get more contributors to FEL :) http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Scholarship == How Fedora benefit from this == The Online Lab as the above youtube video demonstrates, subscribers can access a Fedora session and use the FEL applications, rate, give feedbacks and get familiar to FEL without download and installation. It is a chance to show the quality-class distribution Fedora is and what a Fedora user can achieve with FEL. Companies willing to opensource their inhouse tools/scripts will more likely use Fedora as a means to bring new features to the opensource EDA tools on Fedora. - Xuropa will provide FEL for others to use on their servers. (if people like it, they will download it and promote/rate it) - Many Field Application Engineers will hear Fedora for the first time. - opensource EDA tools will be on the same rank as commercial tools in terms of people mindset about "it's free it's not that good" - more eda bloggers will blog about industry class opensource tools such as perl-Verilog*, gtkwave, tkdiff - We will have more concrete real life suggestions for improvements from big names. We FEL contributors will learn from their experience and leadership skills - (I hope) FEL developers will grant access to some confidential publications for free :) I hope - all this depends on how we(FEL) can help to shape the opensource EDA community to work together. - ..................... - and what I wish the most, help big EDA vendors license their opensource tools in a free distribuable way and use FEL as a means to do so. - more linux support from the chip vendors (if you look at the websites of maxim-ic or linear technology,.. ) they provide free tools to use with their chips. Chip samples anyone can order for free. But it is sad that their tools can't be run under linux. Lots of tiny things like that FEL will benefit from and make others benefit from it. I know it is a long shot, but we all know there is a need to satisfy and I believe we can do step by step. We will hit walls for sure, but we will also have bright days ahead of us. CAD engineers who send time evaluating beta versions of vendors tools on RedHat/CentOS will follow what the next RHEL will provide. == How Upstream projects benefit from this == - More chances that in-house tools or scripts will be opensourced by companies. - More chances upstream tools will have contributors who are willing to shape opensource tools for real life usage - More chances for free marketing or maybe sponsoring - A means to make presentations to the masses via our presence on Xuropa. ..... (more during fosdem) I hope Fedora Board will see this as an opportunity to help both our upstream projects and our new Fedora users. Kind regards, Chitlesh Goorah -- Fedora-marketing-list mailing list Fedora-marketing-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
