Building a community around your open source project (Red Hat Magazine) [LWN.net]

Red Hat Magazine has some nice ideas about building a community around an open source project. "If you have an open source project, most likely you are a designer/developer and not a marketer. Marketing is part of the job though (sorry!), but it doesn't have to take a lot of effort. For starters, think of the related mailing lists you are active on. If you aren't active on any mailing lists, start! Open source lives through free exchange of email. If you see a problem posted that might be solved by your software, it's perfectly acceptable to mention your app. Other projects may exist as alternatives to your own, and you want to respect them, as you want to also respect other users on the lists. Help, but don't advertise."

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Alan Cox on free software non-coders

Posted Sep 24, 2007 11:28 UTC (Mon) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]

Is there also a text transcript?

No transcript

Posted Sep 24, 2007 12:39 UTC (Mon) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

There's no transcript.

If you make one, let me know so that I can mention it on my blog. Or if you make a partial one, please publish it under a very liberal licence (maybe public domain) so that others could fill in the gaps and produce a complete transcript.

Alan Cox on free software non-coders

Posted Sep 24, 2007 12:57 UTC (Mon) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link]

I wonder why it is encoded in Vorbis instead of Speex. I wonder if it would be better (clarity/size) if Speex encoded.

Alan Cox on free software non-coders

Posted Sep 24, 2007 13:31 UTC (Mon) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

The clarity/size would surely be better, but there's also the question of software compatibility.

For this same reason, Wikipedia uses Ogg Vorbis for it's spoken recordings of articles. I've heard there was a long fight about whether to use mp3 for compatibility reasons or whether to support free formats. The free formats won in the end, but they didn't want to weaken their position by advocating the even-less-supported speex format.

Alan Cox on free software non-coders

Posted Sep 24, 2007 13:51 UTC (Mon) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link]

Well, I'm certainly glad that wikipedia uses a free format.

Does anyone have access to the source of the Alan Cox speech? I'm curious how Speex would compare.

pretty sure it's not available

Posted Sep 24, 2007 14:02 UTC (Mon) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

I'm pretty sure that only the ogg was put online. I had asked one of the organisers for it and he pointed me to where it could be gotten:

http://blog.signal2noise.co.uk/cgi-bin/blosxom.pl/technic...