On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 08:35:28PM -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
On Thu, Nov 28, 2013 at 01:08:34AM +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > I don't think we should aim at the general user, because not only is
> > that nebulous, it has all of those same problems. We should be more
> > specific, but we should also choose a segment where those things aren't
> > serious handicaps.
> Remember that we not only need to attract users, we need to attract
> contributors. Aiming to be a big fish in a small pond won't do that.
I agree with the first part. I don't think the analogy helps very much,
though. Are you suggesting that we should try to tackle the general desktop
market with no particular focus at all?
No, I'm suggesting that focusing purely on niche groups is unlikely to
attract a sufficient number of contributors to allow us to ever expand
beyond that niche. I'm not a sysadmin. I've got no interest in
developing an OS that's aimed at sysadmins to the exclusion of others.
If I have a limited amount of time, why should I spend it contributing
to Fedora rather than a project that's more closely aligned with my
interests?
For the goal of attracting contributors, students, developers, and
sysadmins
seem like good target groups. As does the "maker" segment. Those
collectively aren't a cohesive group with exactly the same needs, but the
idea that people have been expressing that _all_ users really need a good
solid all-around environment (rather than something über-specialized)
answers that. I don't think we need to (or should) narrow the interface so
much that it's _limited_ to these users (whatever that would look like), but
we should specifically make sure we do testing with and outreach to these
groups. And, for that matter, to existing contributors.
The one thing in common between all these groups is that they use a
desktop operating system. We're going to need to provide a good one of
those in order to satisfy them all.
--
Matthew Garrett | mjg59(a)srcf.ucam.org