[OpenIndiana-discuss] [illumos-Discuss] branding for illumos/openindiana

[Bayard Bell]

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On 22 Jun 2011, at 09:58, Volker A. Brandt wrote:

> Nikola M. writes:
>> On 06/22/11 09:28 AM, Gregory Youngblood wrote:
>>>> Do you want to tell me that last year, during which I have done
>>>> everything to promote OpenIndiana in my local Open and Free software
>>>> community, is going to be wasted? No one and I really mean no one will ever
>>>> take a second look again if I have to go yet another round of "So, this *was*
>>>> OpenSolaris and it *was* OpenIndiana, now it is SomeOtherShit."
> 
> Damian, you are absolutely completely correct.  I totally fully agree!
> 
>> I would like to share with you some insights about this promotion thing,
>> since in previious period, I was still giving away 2009.06 CD's together
>> with OI update and Illumos/S11ex story to tell.
> 
> Nikola, this is really a much better idea.  Let's focus on producing
> a good stable Live CD and then distribute it as widely as possible.
> I would not mind paying 30 Euros for 100 CDs to give away.  I don't
> know what the actual costs are, but they would be less per CD as
> the total number increases.
> 
> At one point, Sun managed to get the OpenSolaris Live CD included in
> an issue of a well-known and respected computer magazine here in Germany.
> Something like this would be great marketing. :-)

Amidst this outpouring of cratylist fallacy, I tend to the views above: talking about marketing without first identifying your targets of opportunity is folly. The important question is where there is immediate growth potential, what gets us there, and which targets promise to help most with accumulation. Revisiting some of the comments made at the Illumos meet-up, some consideration should be given to existing deployments of Solaris that aren't supported or economically viable with the sharp cut-off of Sun4u support in Solaris 11 or under Oracle's licensing terms.

Sun also had a tremendous presence in universities, and this was valuable not just because computer science students developed a Solaris affinity but because you had people who would push the operating system in intriguing ways and provide very solid bug reports or enhancement requests if and when they had problems. I'm not averse to the idea of trying to pick up users from people running Linux, but I think there's a tremendous opportunity to consolidate the previous Sun base, particularly for people who are looking for an actively developed OS to run on older kit.

More valuable than naming the OS is having solid localisation support for places like Brazil, India, China, and Russia, where there are large pools of engineering talent and interest in open-source software.

These are suggestions sketched out for exemplary purposes, emphasising the fundamental point that I think implicit but clear in Volker's suggestion: branding and marketing require a notion of targeting and some hard work to back up that decision-making process, and I think a thread like this needs more of that kind of bloody-mindedness. I think the objections expressed by Damian are on target for similar reasons: re-branding without having a clear sense of target audience, determinate recruitment strategies, or clear metrics for evaluating progress looks an awful lot like churning and frothing that undermines what progress has been made.

Cheers,
Bayard
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