On 3-Jan-06, at 11:13 PM, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
don't know if attempting to privatize it is really what we want, though.
If the portal is successful in addressing the needs of interested ISVs, I suspect that AdSense could generate plenty of money to pay for hosting and some bounties or contract copyediting, and probably even some profit for an operator. If it's not successful in actually getting people to use and read it, then I think it would behoove the operators to treat that as a critical issue, rather than try to buy their way through that problem.
What are the top 5 topics that target ISVs[*] are searching for? Where are the best articles on that stuff? Are people finding them? Do they need updating?
Summarize those articles with appropriate keyword bait in a wiki somewhere (search engines love them some wikis), or import for easier update if the author is willing, rinse and repeat.
As in far, far too many things -- but especially, IMO, open source projects and even more so with open source "platform" projects -- the perfect is becoming the enemy of the good here, and perfect has better weapons. Pick _one_ area that's crying for attention (packaging? Dan's autopackage-esque compatibility tip sheet? printing? mapping Win32 widget semantics like drag and drop onto X ones?) and aggregate some good information. See if it helps, and what feedback you get, and who thinks it sucks or rules, etc.
[*] I may be speaking against my organization's direct interest, perhaps, but it seems to me that we're spending a lot of time asking people who already _are_ Linux ISVs how to make their lives easier. Those are organizations that _already_ get more in return for being on Linux than they lose to the multifarious traps that the development landscape lays before them, and they'll win even more with whatever improvements are made. To _grow_ the market, you need to target people who are not already Linux ISVs. Why doesn't Adobe have Photoshop for Linux? Someone should ask them. (Or try to engineer having them acquired by Red Hat, I guess.)
I suspect that the answer will probably be more of "market too small" and less of "too hard to figure out the APIs/they're all different" -- I'd be a little surprised if many potential ISVs had looked closely enough at Linux to even know that the APIs _did_ differ between GNOME and KDE, etc. In which case I think the "biggest inhibitor" might boil down to something gut-wrenching like "too much focus on enterprise", but at least people who are looking to grow the Linux desktop will have some new data to chew on, hopefully of higher quality than self-selecting web polls. If nothing else, it might inform some interesting experiments. And, man, if the answer _is_ "need better API docs", are we ever sitting pretty!
Or maybe I'm totally out in left field, or just suffering from being behind on this list's mail, because it seems to me that nobody has actually come out and said why we want a great doc portal. If it's I had to explain it to somebody, it'd probably be "to get more ISVs to target Linux" or even "to get more ISV software on Linux", which is why I'm saying the things you read above. But it's entirely possible that it's for other reasons, in which case it makes perfect sense that I don't understand, and someone should just tell me to shut up.
Mike
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