Safe as Milk

Dissipation

One of the problems of free software is dissipation. Because of its success, there are many avenues of communication, many projects. It has become hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, the signal from the noise.

This works both ways – developers feel they’re not getting quality feedback, and users often don’t have any way to know what’s good and what’s not in terms of applications and communication channels.

We also have more blogs, planets, user communities, news sites, and on & on.

The enthusiasm in the free sofware world is not constant, it’s growing all the time. But it is limited. And as time goes on, the average temperature of our universe is going down.

GNOMErs in Stuttgart

Here’s a special request to Stuttgart GNOME people – could you sign up to guadec-list, and declare yourselves on the wiki, please? We really need more people with local knowledge to help people figure out stuff like where to stay, how to get around, and what there is to do.

This is hillarious. My favourite bit of the pamphlet is point 4, where he says “notice the breasts are violently pierced”.

[Dummy entry to replace one that was apparently lost]

Funny supply & demand curves

RML: Supply of employment is not a linear entity, nor is demand. People must work to eat. Employers must hire people to have the resources to make lots of money.

In addition, the minimum wage only affects a certain class of job. A computer company will not be able to hire anyone at the minimum wage to hack kernels, because that is a different market to the one in which the minimum wage plays a role.

In the market where the minimum wage might play a role, it’s more like perfect competition. There are N low-wage job positions to be filled, and an infinity of people willing to fill them. At 5 dollars an hour, all N will be filled. And at 6 dollars an hour, all N will be filled.

The question is what is the minimum quality of life we as a society want the bottom wage earners to have. If a mother has to get 2 jobs at your alleged point of equilibrium just to be able to pay rent & buy groceries, that’s a problem. The minimum wage is set very simply – what is the minimum someone needs to be able to be paid to survive? If people are working full-time for less than that, that’s society’s problem.

Planning GUADEC

Traffic has picked up a little on guadec-list recently, with more people asking questions about how to get to GUADEC, and suggestions for the schedule and the like.

If you’ve been putting it off, now is definitely the time to subscribe. As I said a couple of weeks back, no GUADEC announcements are going to go to any other maining list from now on. I don’t want to spam people not coming, and I’m expecting everyone who is coming to be subscribed.

The wiki is still there, awaiting your questions, hints, tips, ideas, rants and jokes. Mosey on over to http://live.gnome.org/Stuttgart2005 and help us make GUADEC.

Monday afternoon is officially GNOME planning time. There is a planning session for GNOME 3.0, as well as 2 full hours of time for team meetings, roadmap discussion, information sharing and general fun.

To help organise that time a little, we’re going to hang general labels on some of the main halls – things like “Developers platform”, “Desktop”, “Marketing and user groups”. From around now, we are actively looking for people to lead those sessions – they should be pretty self-organising, but the idea is that teams split off into smaller rooms, do their planning, then come back to the main hall during the second hour and present an overview of the big things to come out of the planning.

So a GTK+ guy will know that the GTK+ planning session will kick off in the “Developers platform” hall, where he will meet up with all the other GTK+ guys. The Cairo, libgnome, bindings, libglade, gconf and other API guys will all be there too. Perhaps they will decide to have a group session for half an hour, then split off. Hey, it’s your conference.

So – go wild! What do you want to do at the end of May? Let us know on guadec-list and live.gnome.org/Stuttgart2005.

Hubert: Maybe he changed the licence because the KDE guys were migrating to BK and he wanted to shaft them.

Honestly though, I don’t know why anyone is surprised. This has been in the pipelines for ages. Bitmover is actively hostile to any free software developer that wants to know what’s going on under the hood.

Linus has a point – he chose BK, and Linux is his baby. That would be fine, if people could obtain copies of BK to reverse engineer the protocol (Larry apparently refuses to even sell copies to competitors or people he considers hostile to him).

The major problem Larry McVoy has is that he doesn’t want to be exposed to the market, or to the way free software works. He criticises people for trying to take away his revenue stream. The people working on reverse engineering BK are not trying to take away your revenue stream, Larry, any more than the people working on Samba are trying to take away Microsoft’s. They’re just trying to get at free information, without paying you for the privilege.

I saw one comment saying that if people further down the chain imported the sources into arch and started using it for kernel development, it would slowly creep up the tree. Having 2 version control systems for 1 project is like having 2 feet for 1 shoe. It doesn’t work. The value in a version control system is to easily pull information from, and push information to, other people. Until there is an arch to bitkeeper gateway, where people can commit from arch clients into a bk repository, that isn’t happening with the kernel.

That’s twice now the post directly after mine has been planet spam… is someone trying to tell me something?

I’ve been readin Eric Sink’s blog on marketing for geeks, and found the series he did on the 22 immutable laws of marketing very interesting (it’s the grind notes of the book, more or less).

And several of those laws could do with being applied to GNOME.

For example, what is our focus? What is our market? what is our position in that market?

Some of those questions have seeds of an answer in the MarketingTeam section of the wiki, but we are missing polish, and rigour.

So here are some propositions – we need to focus GNOME’s self image. We need to be realisting about who is likely to adapt our software.

We have only 2 target markets. Both are healthy, but they are radically different (oops). The first is early adopter geeks. Right now, we’re number 2 in that market. The second is free software adopters in local government. And there we’re number 1.

So how can we position ourselves? For the public administration clients our message is straightforward – GNOME is easy to learn, and easy to use. Usability is our number 1 selling point. GNOME Just Works (TM).

Early adopter geeks generally don’t care about that, though. Which means either we have to broaden our scope (not a good idea) to find a market where this is important, which is closely related to the geek segment, or we have to fragment our message, also not a good idea.

The alternative is live with the fact that we are going to be number 2 among early adopters, and focus on crossing the chasm, and marketing to people who do care about having a computer that is easy to learn, and easy to use. Which sounds good to me.

So let’s practice – GNOME is the free software desktop which is easiest to learn, and easiest to use.

OK, it’s not snappy, and it needs a bit of work. For a start we don’t identify ourselves with public administration. I’m all ears.

Viral marketing

I had a revelation recently about the job market.

I don’t know if anyone else has the same experience, but I regularly receive mails from recruitment agencies along the lines of “We are looking for an experienced J2EE/JSP/web developer for a client” – usually with some kind of open source experience appreciated.

Up until recently, when I was in the job market I simply replied saying what type of jobs I was actually interested in, or when I wasn’t just ignoring them. In the first case, the chances of that actually changing my interraction with the agency in question is, by experience, close to 0.

Recently, I thought that a change in tack might be a good idea – and since I think it’s a good idea, I thought I’d share it. It occurred to me that people sending out job offers from service companies are also in the decision chain about what solutions are proposed to clients.

The last couple of times I have gotten these kind of spam mails, I have replied something along these lines:

Thank you for your interest. I am currently working full time as a project manager, and in my spare time with the GNOME desktop project. The position you are filling is, therefore, not of interest to me.

If you are interested, I would be glad to discuss the project with you, and how it can offer value to your clients.

As you know, companies are using free software more and more in server software and network infrastructure. At GNOME, we have worked on a desktop environment which is easy to learn, and easy to use. In many situations, GNOME is the best choice available.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Regards,
Dave Neary.

I’m not sure what effect, if any, this has. But since these companies are generally somewhere in the chain of deciding what software is deployed to clients, there is no harm at all in evangelising a little. Anyone with similar viral marketing techniques?