Marketing GNUstep (was: Cocoa/Windows parallel dvlpmt)

[Sascha Erni, -.rb]

Hi there,

Philip Mötteli wrote:
> Am 04.02.2004 um 12:51 schrieb Philippe C.D. Robert:
> > Unfortunately, as you already mentioned, the GNUstep project is not 
> > very talented when it comes to marketing :-( Any ideas how to change 
> > this?
>
>
> That's not easy and I do not have the time to develop a marketing 
> strategy for GS now. I'm not the expert in such things either, though I 
> ahd some few classes about it.

Will be quite a challenge, mainly due to the nature of the GNUstep 
project. As has been pointed out before, GNUstep is more of an idea than 
a "product". Marketing a concept usually asks for a strong name / group 
/ individual to be a) the responsible party, b) a figurehead or c) vocal 
spokespersons. Think Java / Sun, Linux / Linus. GNOME has good company 
backing, as does KDE.

I don't really see anything like this in the case of GNUstep, but then, 
I have only been around for 7 weeks so please do correct me. I'd need 
more time to get a grip on the GNUstep community, the who's who, 
companies using GNUstep etc.. No offence meant, but from my end the 
GNUstep project looks pretty much like a small group of idealists 
fighting a lost cause but not giving up just yet, which is fine by me. ;)

With the information I have at the moment (i.e. very little), marketing 
GNUstep with guerilla marketing and/or a Trojan horse approach might be 
the most viable option. It will be pretty much "image marketing" rather 
than product marketing, anyway. I'll have to think about it some more, 
but, well--it's not as if we could do print ads in Computer World or get 
a distributor to include GNUstep with the default installation. For the 
former you'll need lots of money and something you can "show" (or a big 
wig name you can use to do the marketing with, à la "Oy, look here, 
Lookhead runs GNUstep. Why don't you?"), the latter asks for killer 
applications and / or GNUstep "just working" right out of the box, 
ideally without getting in the way of the preferred desktop environment 
but STILL providing a service said desktop environments lack. And IMHO 
we're not there, just yet.

Feedback is welcome indeed. And are there any other marketing blokes on 
this list? Perhaps we could gang up and invest some serious brain time 
on this one. Might be fun.

93,
-Sascha.rb

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