[Community] phones

[Neal H. Walfield]

At Mon, 16 Sep 2013 22:53:45 +0200,
Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller wrote:
> This is how we all would love to see it.
> 
> But if I compare sucessful campaigns and failed campaigns, I see a different picture.
> 
> Look at this:
> 
> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/omate/omate-truesmart-water-resistant-standalone-smartwa
> 
> and compare with this:
> 
> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/203272607/gnustep-project
> 
> The latter being a GNU FOSS project where even RMS did write some first lines of code.
> But the campaign was a one-man show and just a simple video. Therefore its fate was to
> fail, even at a target of mere 50k USD.
> 
> The first one is obviously backed by a venture capital fund and a marketing campaign and
> is obviously much more successful...
> 
> So it is not that companies require good marketing. Or someone is telling that as an urban legend.
> 
> It are the users and potential pledgers of the crowd funding campaigns who prefer good marketing
> (like everywhere in life).

This isn't a fair comparison.  I don't think GNU Step is sexy.  As I
understand it, it is mostly just a clone of Apple's Cocoa interfaces.
If there were no other FLOSS UI toolkits, that would be good, but
there are.  In fact, there are several, which are much more popular in
the FLOSS world, namely, GTK+ and Qt.  Further, one of the selling
points of the kick starter is providing better support for proprietary
applications:

  "GNUstep provides an avenue for developers who have invested their
  time and money in developing Cocoa based applications to easily
  bring their apps to other platforms with a simple recompile."

So, as a FLOSS supporter, this is not a project that I would invest my
money in.

GTA04, on the other hand, is unique: it doesn't have any competitors
in the FLOSS world.

Neal