Andreas Tille <
tillea@rki.de> wrote:
Hi Andreas,
There is no reason for developers to spend their time to
have smalltalk with people.
Those two lines really sum up your whole mail: you are way off.
Smalltalk is exactly what we're doing in this kind of
exhibitions. That's called "meeting the community", the other one, the
*users* community. If you're not interested in that, I suggest you
stick to high-profile technical conferences and don't run a booth
again.
Most people come to those exhibitions to have a look at this Linux
thing and ask basic questions, sometimes even stupid questions. We
answer them, show them our distro, walk them through some demos. If
they're interested, they'll want to take a CD/DVD (or a LiveCD) home
to try it out on their own.
Even on Solutions Linux, which is a professional exhibition, those are
the people we see most at our booth.
Enthusiasts make up for a small part of the people we get to see, and
they come see us for a variety of reasons: saying hello, meeting the
developers of their favorite distributions, giving some feedback on
stuff they've done, telling us about Debian installations we couldn't
even dream of, getting their laptop fixed, getting some help on
packaging something, ...
That's what these exhibitions are for.
I appreciate that you gave some of your time to man a booth at an
exhibition, but really, if you don't enjoy it, don't do it again.