Re: new website draft 8: almost giving up

[Graham Percival]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 06:39:20PM -0300, Han-Wen Nienhuys wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 3:58 AM, Jan
> Nieuwenhuizen<address@hidden> wrote:
> >> - GNU and (new) website can be trimmed from the title.
> >
> > We do not want to trim GNU.  Remember the long thread on devel,
> > where even contributors did not realise we are GNU, or ever heard of it?
> 
> Whom is this site for?  Are we trying to attract new users (that
> likely will be confounded by the GNU moniker) , or contributors?

The Introduction section is definitely for attracting new users.
The home page... well, I guess that's also mostly aimed at new
users.  As such, I don't mind trimming the GNU from the title.


> I am saying that in the propaganda story, the storyline should not go
> from examples to politics , I think.  Also,  the question

IMO, "you don't need to pay" is a very important part of the
storyline.  Now, I'm not opposed to changing the name from
"Freedom" to "Free".

>   Why do LilyPond developers “give away” their work for free?
> 
> is interesting for a faq, but I doubt the answer will convince users
> to download.  I am assuming that the Introduction part is an attempt
> to convince visitors to download and try lilypond as soon as possible.

Maybe Canadians and Singaporeans are most cynical than
Europeans... actually, I'd be willing to bet money on that,
irregardless of this debate... but as soon as you say that
something is free, people assume that it's garbage.  That _might_
change with high-profile projects like Firefox... but in that
case, most people assume that it's either funded by Netscape or
Google.  (Which is pretty much the truth, anyway.)

IMO, it would be dangerous to say "here's a free music engraver,
without any advertizing, corporate sponsorship[1], or even wacky
EU grants".  Some people *will* assume that it must be junk.

[1] other than the download sponsorship.


The "why do you do this?" is drawn directly from my experience
mentioning lilypond to non-geeks.  It's the first question from
musicians, music teachers, non-musicians, and my parents.
Answering it immediately avoids this confusion.

(I tried to mention that we have a few professors working on
lilypond -- again, trying to reinforce that we are (mostly)
serious, skilled, and professional -- but every attempt ended up
being too wordy.)


Again, this material -- both Freedom in general, and "why do
develoeprs..." -- is clearly marked.  If a reader isn't
interested, it's easy to skip over it and proceed.

> Also, as smart as search engines may be,  I am not sure that there is
> stemming that would correlate [free] (the query word) with [freedom]
> (whats on the page, in the submenu).

It's not that; Jan thought you were objecting to having:
  LilyPond is Free Software and part of the GNU project.
on the home page.

Frankly, I'm still not conviced that's a good thing to add, so
it's understandable that he thought you were complaining about
that.  :)

Cheers,
- Graham