Choosing a target market is more than making a listing of your competitors' markets and combining some words to create a unique-sounding market. And it's more that guessing that some as-yet-unidentified market can be grepped from the imagination. For Mageia, it's an expression of leadership. It won't be found in a mail list survey or a popularity poll; it will be found in the Mageia leadership.
There are many, many Linux distros in existence. Each has its own take on kernel patches, packaging managers, desktops, multimedia, programming languages, management tools, color schemes and so on. These things are superficial since once installed, every Linux distro is doing essentially the same thing. The choice of those little pieces and their development is what excites and motivates the people that put together the distro The effectiveness of all these pieces is what excites and motivates the user of the distro. Meeting the needs of the end user determines if the distro will be popular or not. But it's picking the correct end user to target that determines the ultimate success of the distro. Mandriva never figured out who its end user was or what its market was and as a result tried to be everything to everybody and failed, not because it was a bad distro (it remains one of the best), but because it never had focus, it never knew its market. One of the most important things that the Mageia leadership needs to determine is the focus, the goal, the entire point of the existence of Mageia. The leadership needs to decide. They need to do it because they need the investment in order to be motivated to lead, manage and build the distro. They need to do it because it demonstrates that they are capable of leading us and are worth investing in. They need to do it because it needs to be done now. -- Hoyt _______________________________________________ Mageia-dev mailing list Mageia-dev@mageia.org https://www.mageia.org/mailman/listinfo/mageia-dev