Blog of Sylvain Le Gall

Last week i was at Solution Linux 2007. I meet some other debian developper and it is good to meet some member of the community. I am a little bit disappointed concerning the people who attends this event. It was not as crowded as it used to be. I think Linux is no more the top "hype" thing of the year (but i heard at least twice "web 2.0" during the show... the "hype" was here).

During a discussion after this, i realize that some people think that the town of associations ("village des assoces" in french) was not enough opened to non-technical users. This guy thinks that open-source guy doesn't know how to sell OSS.

I am wondering if the spirit of the OSS is to "sell" anything to the public. Most of the people that are working on this are technical guy, there is no real "marketing" staff of the open source among them. I think that the core is essentially non-marketing guy (i really do think no one will never perform selling "cron" or "at" to any windows users -- and they are essential components of a GNU/Linux distribution).

After all, what does the OSS has to win doing "maketing" things. More users ? To my mind it is non sense, users coming to GNU/Linux, for example, must have personnal motivation. It is not like selling a box with a "Windows Vista" compatible sticker on it. They will loose a lot of applications, habits and eye-candiness. They should have a stronger reason to do that. This must be a real "motivation". I won't try to convince a guy that there is no problem using OSS -- because nothings is perfect.

As conclusion, i think that the town of associations was what it should be : a place where OSS developper can meet.