Re: SEUL: About Independence, LaetOs, RedHat and Debian

[Al Hudson <eah106@york.ac.uk>]

On Fri, 9 Apr 1999, Roger Dingledine wrote:

> One of the big ways we can help work together with other projects is to be
> the group with all the faqs and advocacy documentation. For instance, it
> would be really good to sit down, thumb through this discussion, and write
> up a set of frequently asked questions, and frequently used (good)
> arguments, for starting out a new distrib or deciding not to. I could help
> contribute to this and edit it, if somebody wants to volunteer to lead and
> coordinate it. (Volunteers?) This way, we'd have a document we could point
> people to next time they decide to come up with a new distrib, rather than
> having to go through a long discussion with them.

You've got a volunteer for that right here ;)) I think, as a newcomer into
these projects, one of the things that struck me was, to an extent, the
amount of people working in this sort of area. You have people at RHAD
working on gnome, interfaces, etc., all the way through to people
developing small pieces of software that help users in small ways. There's
an awful lot of people out there wanting to get linux mainstream in the
home market, and all these different projects sometimes seem to be hidden
away in various net nooks and crannies - all the global advances in recent
years seem to have come through better communication infrastructures, I
guess we could do with some of that ;)

> Quite a few people go through the seul site each day (more when we announce
> new additions), so we have some influence when we choose to support or not
> support a project. This also means that putting an advocacy document,
> persuasive essay, or list of resources on our site (with a pointer to the
> projects that helped develop it) gets everybody more publicity.

I think advocacy is one area vastly underrated. For a lot of people, it's
the software that does the real talking, but I think also a well-reasoned
argument is incredibly persuasive, and let's face it - there's a lot to
linux which makes it a very attractive proposition. The two advancements
to be made, therefore, are making it's less attractive side more
attractive (the software), and telling people about the attractive stuff
(the advocacy).

> I guess we could best be characterized (at least for this facet) as
> meta-development. From our perspective, it's all about keeping the user and
> development community informed, coordinated, and educated.

I agree.

Cheers,

Alex.