[kde-promo] WSJ Strikeout and TypeHeads [LONG]

[Navindra Umanee]

David Faure <dfaure at trolltech.com> wrote:
> French people are bad at English and don't like reading subtitles, hence the
> (awful) dubbing, however I really *REALLY* don't see what this has to
> do with kde promotion! Let's stop this thread and move on, please.

It didn't...  although this may give some credence to the American
"club" idea.  GNOME is well-grounded in the US, despite its roots,
thanks to American companies like Ximian and Red Hat and Sun backing
it.  What does KDE have?

For KDE to get credibility in the US, it would help to have someone
actively working on American issues, or with an American outlook.  For
example, to get KDE adopted by the US government, accessibility is a
big deal if not a deal breaker.  In American tradeshows, KDE needs
someone with big pockets pushing it instead of being pushed out by
companies like Ximian.

Since we don't have any such resources however, I guess grassroots is
the way to go...  We need to get a bunch of little American companies
supporting and using KDE.  Just yesterday somebody contacted us at the
dot because he was trying to convince his boss to switch to Linux and
other Open Source software.  I pointed him at some enterprise.kde.org
stuff, which is rather old and severely maintained and hard to browse,
and I so wished there was a better resource I could point him at.  I
mean, I couldn't even find the City of Largo case documented there
although we had a dot article on it.

In summary:

It would be nice to bring enterprise.kde.org up to snuff and have a
compelling resource our existing American (or other) users, trying to
promote KDE in their company, can show to their pointy-haired boss.
Additionally, it might be nice to have an advocacy-howto for such
people, and if we want to go all the way we might indeed have to
promote full Open Source solutions like KGX.

And another thing, it might be nice to work specifically on the Red
Hat/Ximian/Sun situation.  We need to make these companies understand
that properly supporting KDE can be beneficial to all.  But before all
that we need to open some official channels with them...  

Case in point, Sun is releasing Java with a GTK+ look and feel for
Linux but no mention or support for KDE.  I have hopes for the Red Hat
situation though thanks to people like Havoc being around.  I just
wish we could convince Red Hat to install kdelibs/kdebase by default
even though KDE isn't their default desktop.  How hard would it be for
them to that?  Not hard at all.  We just need someone working on it
and getting them to understand.  It might be easier to work from the
Red Hat Europe angle because they are constantly aware of the
importance of KDE support in Europe.  Now Ximian is a problem, but
someone should at least try to open a channel with them and make them
see a benefit in supporting or at least not working against KDE.

I also do agree it would be a big help to demolish the American
perception (encouraged by competitors in the US) that KDE is a
"European product".

All this is just stupid talk though, if nobody is going to do the
work...

Cheers,
Navin.
 
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