Re: RFD: Debian advertising in LJ, elsewhere
On May 23, Peter Moulder wrote:
> We do not want to switch people if they're better off using some other
> distribution, and nor do we wish to waste effort switching someone who
> is equally well off whether they use Debian or some other distribution.
I think the LJ ad would be mainly directed at:
1. People who are new to Linux. My guess is people new to Linux in
1999 would buy LJ before selecting a distribution (unless they've
already picked up a copy of Red Hat, in which case it's too late
for now).
2. People who want to "step up" to a more sophisticated system. Not
even Red Hat + contrib matches the selection of Debian, and
Debian's quality is uniformly high (there's no "contrib dropoff").
3. Everyone. Debian needs positive publicity in the "mainstream"
Linux world. If nothing else, it says "Debian is here, just like
we've always been." It would remind people that there is a
principled alternative to commercial Linux distributions. It would
help shake off the "hackers only" image that we've acquired because
nobody *individually* has a vested interest in promoting
Debian... read Dan Quinlan's article in this month's LJ, which left
me with the impression that he thought Debian was no longer a "big
boy" distribution (lumped in with, among others, Yggdrasil and SLS;
this may be a misreading of his *intent* but certainly not of what
some newbie could perceive).
I don't think switching is productive for most people, although I bet
Debian's upgrade path is smoother than Red Hat's, once you get through
the first install.
> However, an ad may be beneficial in redressing imbalance in image
> portrayal if such an imbalance exists.
See 3. Count the number of ads for Debian in LJ. You may see a
mention or two buried in the Infomagic ad. Compare that to ads for
Red Hat, Caldera, Pacific HiTech (TurboLinux), SuSE and Walnut Creek
(Slackware). Anyone could be left with the mistaken impression that
those are the only distributions out there... Beyond the ads, LJ is
more balanced (mainly because a lot of Debian people write stuff for
LJ... Martin "Joey" Schulze has an article in this month's LJ, for
example), but the ads are where a lot of people decide what to use.
Personal experience note: I probably wouldn't have put Debian on my
i386 unless I'd already installed and used it on my m68k box (and that
only because Debian--still--has the best multiarch support of any
distribution).
In any event, I wouldn't expect a penny from SPI for this
project... just a few (or, better yet, a bunch of) Debian CD vendors
pooling some resources to (a) give an in-kind contribution of free (to
SPI and everyone else) PR to Debian and (b) give ourselves some
publicity we simply couldn't afford to buy on our own.
Chris
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