Re: [ros-dev] On the growth of the reactos project

[victor martinez]

Hi,
Well it´s nice to see that a Dev is asking in the ML about this issue. If instead Samuel
the email were sent by a new guy,the most probably answer would have been "Patches
are accepted","Less arguing more patching","DIY"..which is a nice
way of saying "shut up" and not trying to find a way.You can find these answers
in forum, which "is" our main Users base income. 

I'm agree with the "Attracting developers" instead "Users"
idea,but..until now this approach(if we are following any)didnt work.In the last year just
¿two?,¿three? developers have come, and some has gone or are in IDLE mode. Why isnt this
approach working?
1)What are we doing to "Attract developers"? ReactOS is going to 2-3 FOSS
meetings at year. Is it enough?I doubt it.
2)Which strategies are we using to attract Devs and not Users? 
3)Do we have any strategy at all?
4)How many potential Devs know about ReactOS?

Next point: "Attracting Devs and not Users"

I´m totally agree with this approach,but until now i didnt see a clear move in this
direction. And maybe the reason is that is impossible to attract Devs without attracting
Users.
Let´s imagine we are gold miners, devs are Gold and users are Earth. There are two
approaches to find gold. The first approach is the "Surface goldmining", the
Gold miner goes to a logical place where gold is present and he tries just to pick the
gold nuggets from the surface of the earth, it´s quite impossible to pick a clean gold
nugget, it always goes with some Earth sticked, but also there are just few gold nuggets
in the surface.Gold is quite valuable and other project..err..i mean..gold miners have
taken them.
The second approach is the "Digging goldmining", this means touching a lot of
Earth, moving sand just to reach the main seam of Gold. In order words, reaching to all
possible people so among them you will find the valuable Gold.


I like the idea of "Attracting Developers and not Users" because Users are
selfish: if one app doesnt work they say ReactOS sucks. In the same way they have damaged
OpenOffice because it was unable to open MS documments correctly.Now OO maybe opens the
documments correctly but the damage is done. We have to choose the correct moment to
attract Users so ReactOS get spread by word of mouth in a positive way.This is quite
important.


Also we cant forget about the "Attracting Companies", ReactOS general idea is
interesting as you can see with the TMax-company approach.So we arent convincing the
companies or they dont know this project at all.Also finding other new-unexplored ways of
"selling" ReactOS as a product would be nice(although maybe too soon for these
new-unexplored) i.e: maybe Adobe is interested in having a special ReactOS-Distro where
their products runs with better performance(thanks to a special Memory management)and a
Special GUI for developing.It would still let other windows apps to be installed.Too soon
for this symbiosis as i said but another door to knock.Another way of selling ReactOS as a
product.

Regards,
Víctor Martínez Calvo


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