On Fri, 2010-04-16 at 18:05 -0500, inode0 wrote: > On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 5:46 PM, Nelson Marques <07721@xxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > ... snip lots of interesting stuff ... > > > > * About Marketing itself: > > > > "Marketing is the social process by which individuals and groups obtain > > what they need and want through creating and exchanging products and > > value with others" - Philip Kotler > > > > The process of exchanging products and value has nothing to do with > > "monetary units". I'm not quite sure why everyone tries to place $stash > > there. > > > > Applying that to Fedora, Marketing should realize on what Fedora users > > want and provide them a product (Fedora Linux) that meets their needs. > > This will conduct to a recognition of Value on Fedora Linux (product) by > > our users. > > I'm really not sure that is how I would do the translation to Fedora > in this case. For most Fedora users the "product" is largely a gift > where nothing is exchanged.. Nothing is exchanged? Robyn's contribution to Fedora 13 slogan: "Rock it": * We provide a zero cost (lets assume it that way) free operating system; * Rock it; We provide a experience; * We provide an alternative; - We get revenue? No. We get something back? Off course we do; users recognition for prime engineering software. A contact between the user and our philosophy. He might not get enrolled with the Fedora Community, but he is already enrolled with FOSS (and eventually at the very low level with FEdora) by moment he downloads the software. I've said this more than once: profit doesn't need to be based on monetary units (€'s, $US, etc etc). It can be also translated in social profit (easy to associate with our Foundations). This is mainly how I see it. There was once a workshop with Nicklodeon's Marketing Director. He was explaining how he got kidnapped by alliens and how he learned their numbers. He was making the symbols and telling us what those numbers where. No one made a damn clue about it and everyone was thinking that he was a looney. Eventually he pops out with "out of the box" and soon enough everyone was enlightened. This was a very amusing experience. This to say, that sometimes we need to think "out of the box". But most of us are just twisted by our day to day life. For example, a kid you know around 10 years or a bit older. Give him a Fedora DVD, explain him what it is (in words he can understand) and try to get him to say what if he got something that you can consider as a trade (at 10 he will never become a fedora contributor). But it is a trade. > To see a real exchange we need to look at > Fedora contributors, not Fedora users. When we give the contributors > what they want they give back to the project. Those keep the project alive, for sure. Totally agree, but that doesn't mean that all the others who don't and only use fedora don't recognize value in a trade (by downloading our software for instance). Today's user might be tomorrow's potential contributor. It's up to us Marketing twisted monkeys to make it happen. My interview with Dan tried to explore that gap and make an approach to why possible contributors sometimes don't enroll. >From my personal experience and going into another level, this is what happened (I am not going into much detail because somewhere there are the NDA's I signed). When I was Portugal Telecom (PT), we used Red Hat 6.0 to deploy a large number of platforms running services to support our GSM GPRS infra-structure. This was a part of a larger program to get PT free from very nasty royalties that we were paying mainly to HP, as most of the crap was actually HP/UX+Hardware powered. The hardest part was to convince our customer TMN (National Mobile Telecommunications), the mobile operator from the PT Group to deploy this platforms and their reliability. We were also changing into IA32. Their concerns were to ensure a 4 hour service. Everything that could happen could not take more than 4 hours to solve, hardware or software wise. We (PT Inovation, the R&D Technology Division from PT Group) would ensure and make the contract for service support and IBM kicked in for the hardware (this was also a large contract for them). It was IBM who convinced them through a small presentation about Linux deployment. Oracle also had it's role there (and it mainly due to Oracle's involvement that we went Red Hat, as Oracle 8i back then was important). You have no idea on how much HP would be loosing in contracts in the following years (they still have HP stuff, but as technology is upgrade, it grows thiner). Did we ever contributed to RedHat or FOSS? No. Some patches we tried to submit were often turned down by maintainers, mainly because they served our own purposes and most times were cutting security holes by eliminating what some called "features". This all to say that though we never contributed to FOSS, the ammount of money involved in those contracts favored IBM and Oracle. Don't they deploy a huge ammount of money into FOSS? Not for sure because they want to help us, but because when Linux is considered as an option by some big fat wallet customers they want to grab those contracts. HP loss many contracts for the PT Group, other companies like IBM got them (hardware mainly), and they promoted Linux with us against other proprietary vendors for the very same contracts. Thats probably why all those companies want to support FOSS, not only because they like it... they like because it generates millions of revenue in support contracts. This to say... we might not see things as they work in many cases. I would also take 1 line to say that Red Hat most likely stood up from the very early against companies that were way more powerful, and they managed to cut a large part on their proprietary UNIX markets. I do take my hat for their work in the last 12 years. It's for sure an example to us all. Benefit is always there even if we don't see it clearly. If companies like the PT Group wouldn't see a reliable alternative in FOSS, they were still injecting thousands of millions in proprietary UNIX's, and maybe proprietary UNIX's vendors weren't injecting so much in FOSS development like they do nowadays... not because they care about our users, but because in the huge fat contracts Linux and YOUR engineering is owning them all. My personal view and once more, sorry for the wall of text. Mostly I agree with you, but I see a value recognition in those "trades" even if the users don't directly contribute to us. > > John -- marketing mailing list marketing@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing
