Re: Hurd Advocacy?
On Fri, Aug 15, 2003 at 01:31:37PM -0700, Hurd Advocate wrote:
> - Do we suffer from a lack of charasmatic leadership and direction?
If there is anything that the Hurd does _not_ lack, then it is
direction. It seems to me that it actually has too much direction. :)
> - Is advertising our problem? Do we not get enough exposure to
> potential developers?
The advertising has been improved significantly in the last couple of
years. But we need to continue being active in this area. We need to
give talks, distribute flyers (I started some work on this a while ago
and will finish it this or next year), talk to people at conferences,
write articles for magazines and web sites, etc. As Paul Graham
noted, people will not listen to you when they see that you are there;
they will listen to you when they see that you are _still_ there. I
think we've been around long enough now that people start to believe
that the Hurd actually is a project worth developing, so I'd expect
the problem of having too few developers to become smaller and
smaller. However, we should make it as easy as possible for people to
make an initial contribution, because if someone has made something
once, it's very likely that the person will do it again (a concept
also used by drug dealers, the church and many others). Maybe asking
people who are merely interested in the Hurd (e.g. on IRC) for advice
or about their opinions on implementation or design details could help
here.
When we tell people about the Hurd, we should not waste time with
telling them about technological details or things which are unusual
about the Hurd. Someone who is interested will figure these things
out anyway. Instead, we need to tell people about advantages. This
means that to promote the Hurd, one needs to know not only *how*
things are done, but *why* things are done this way, so probably one
needs to know a lot about the Hurd before being able to effectively
promote it. A danger that needs to be avoided is that people can
easiely get the impression that the Hurd is hard to learn when you
tell them what is different about it (as opposed to saying what its
advantages are). Remember, people are lazy and want to reuse their
existing knowledge; so always mention that the Hurd is not only very
flexible, but also very _compatible_. (I think the Fresco people have
the problem that their project looks too different.)
I could go on for hours about this...
Cheers,
GNU/Wolfgang
--
"A good programming language should have features that make the kind
of people who use the phrase `software engineering' shake their heads
disapprovingly." -- Paul Graham
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