latest draft for mission (and strategy)

[Sebastian Kügler]

On donderdag 6 juli 2017 01:45:59 CEST Clemens Toennies wrote:
> Am 05.07.2017 um 22:58 schrieb Alexander Neundorf:
> > On 2017 M07 5, Wed 15:05:26 CEST Clemens Toennies wrote:
> >> On Jul 5, 2017 13:14, "Sebastian Kügler" <sebas at kde.org> wrote:
> 
> >> How about Freedom?
> 
> > The "KDE - Digital Freedom" is one of my favourite T-shirts...
> > Still, there exists already a software organizatio which has freedom as
> > its
> > main goal: GNU.
> 
> Gnome already builds a "free" desktop, so why should we?
> Good thing they dont have a monopoly on it 
> 
> Imo we deliver quite advanced free software that helps people experience
> freedom like e.g. Krita, Kdenlive and many others that are more
> practical than comparable organizations like GNU have to offer.
> So we as KDE should not need to cut down ourself to strive for a smaller
> subset of "Freedom" (aka Privacy or Android) in our mission (or vision)
> only because some other organization claims to have the same goal.

Krita is an excellent example though to demonstrate how well specialization 
works -- instead of trying to do a photoshop clone, Krita found its niche in 
natural painting and has quickly become the best in class in that field (as 
far as I know).

Having done promotion in KDE for a really long time, I tend to agree that 
Freedom is too broad and too abstract for many people to understand and be 
really compelling. We tried to make it less abstract and promote freedom at 
our core much more (the t-shirt Alex mentioned is one of the assets I made 
exactly with that purpose, so is the slogan "Be free" that you mentioned, but 
it hasn't given us the focus we need. From a marketing point of view, KDE 
needs to find a niche from where it can really shine and break into new new 
markets, be the best-in-class. 

I do believe that privacy is a very suitable niche for KDE, it's hugely 
important nowadays, it's a lot easier to communicate the need for it than the 
very abstract concept of Freedom, and, most importantly, it really is one of 
the things that we, diverse as we are, all agree on. In other words, it's what 
we really want, and where we can make a difference. Both of those aspects are 
needed to be successful in highly competitive markets.
-- 
sebas

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