Greetings,
Here's an idea that occurred to me yesterday after reading Geir's post
about booth at Java ONE. I think this is a good opportunity, but needs
more thoughts.
You know how James Gosling keeps saying that Sun's customers tell them
they would run for the hills if Java was opensourced, etc., etc.? Well,
JavaOne is a gathering of just these types of customers, and they will
be walking around the pavilion, possibly stopping by the Apache booth.
What an opportunity to validate (and hopefully disprove) that assertion!
If we could just come up with a way to poll people as they stop by the
booth, we might have an excellent argument to counteract Gonsling's
FUD/misunderstanding (whichever it is).
Not only that, but at the same time we could actually educate people on
(a) what OSS is *really* all about, (b) what Apache and Harmony's
intentions are for Java (no incompatibility, just improvement), (c)
about work that has already been done by other OSS projects in the Java
VM field (gcj, classpath, etc).
Without the booth, there will be a few people that come the OSS-related
sessions, fewer still will be at the Harmony session. But the booth
changes things. If we conduct this kind of poll at the booth, and
generate buzz about the booth at the sessions, we could reach vastly
more people! Of course the booth is meant to be shared between all
Java-related Apache projects, but isn't Harmony kind of an overriding
umbrella that relates to and benefits all of these projects? Logically,
it makes sense to have Harmony represented at the booth at all times,
even if politically this may require negotiation. But maybe having a
poll station and a stand with questions (see below), even as the rest of
the booth is devoted to other topics, wouldn't be that difficult?
Isn't this an exciting opportunity? What I envision is something like
this. Like I said, this requires more thought on exactly how to do this.
We present people with a series of questions, maybe 3 or 4, designed to
spark their interest and explain benefits of a fully-compatible OSS Java
implementation to them. At the end, we ask - Would you support an open
source Java implementation that delivered the above? Yes / No. This
could be printed on a largish poster so that people see it over the
heads of others and also printed on postcard-sized sheets of paper.
Under the poster and next to these postcards we put two fishbowls with
big "Yes" and "No" scotch-taped to them. They grab the postcard, mark
off their answer, fill in a comment if they want, and drop it in the
right bowl. It might be good to ask for their name and org, but I'm not
sure. Having that would help with legitimacy, but it's too much work to
fill out and will cause lots of work for us to sort though anyway.
I don't suppose we are going to have one of those card readers there,
will we? I think they cost extra.
Now, the postcards have an additional benefit. It's a matter of funds to
print more of them, but the more we have, the more we can use them. We
can distribute them at the entrance, cafeteria, etc. We can distribute
them at sessions. The cards would also have the booth number on them to
draw people in. They could even be as small as business cards, but they
will be hard to see then. This would also just draw people to the Apache
booth in general, so other projects might even be interested in
supporting this idea as well.
So, what about the questions? Here are some ideas.
At the top, in large font, a big draw-in header. Something like: Is Open
Source Java a Good Thing?
Then something like this:
<bold>Have you ever found a bug in Java that broke your application?
You could have just fixed it, but had to work around it
instead?</bold>
OSS Java will not only let you fix it and distribute your code with your
application, but you would benefit from other people making such fixes,
while you can just focus on your work and stop wasting time on workarounds!
<bold>Do you work with a platform that Sun's Java does not support?
Have you ever wished that someone would just write a good JVM
for it?</bold>
OSS Java with a vibrant community will provide an incentive to do just
this. Because codebase is shared and understood by many people, the cost
of adding a new platform becomes smaller over time, while the benefits
become larger!
.....
It needs a third one, but I can't think of one right now. I think we
absolutely need to emphasize rigorous compatibility. But I can't think
of how to put that in this format at the moment. Thoughts? Comments?
What other benefits do we want to highlight?
Regards
Dmitry
Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:
All,
The ASF will have a booth at JavaOne this year. We will be staffing
the booth with projects, each project there for 2 hours or so to tell
people about the project and the ASF in general.
If anyone would like to volunteer to help out, add your name here :
http://wiki.apache.org/jakarta/ApacheAtJavaOne2005
geir
