Marketing Fedora

It is an exciting time for free software as massive strides forward have been made in increasing both market share and mind share within the less technically orientated circles of society. Ubuntu is now available pre-installed on Dell systems, SUSE on Lenovo systems, the Xandros based eeePC has sold millions already and the One Laptop Per Child project has gone into mass production. Stephen Fry, the popular British actor, is even pledging his support in national newspapers. Taking advantage of this momentum and using it to help extend existing communities is going to be vital for any free software project, and with this in mind Fedora is seeking to set itself on solid ground with a revitalised marketing effort which hopes to both define Fedora's position in the world and find new ways of growing its user and contributor base.

Recently the first tentative steps have been made along this path with the revitalising of Fedora's community marketing team. In Fedora talk there is now an official Special Interest Group (SIG). Following on from a session at the recent Fedora Users' and Developers' Conference the SIG is gaining a lot of momentum, with input from Red Hat's professional marketing team pouring in. This help is being provided on top of their Red Hat duties, and so their involvement is exactly the same as that of any other community members. So far their contributions have largely been aiding the creation of a long term marketing plan for Fedora, which will help to provide a more consistent message across Fedora's many outlets. This means that not only will Fedora's community Ambassadors be better briefed on what the key promotional aspects of Fedora are, but they'll have a better understanding of the best methods to achieve this and more support in terms of marketing collateral. The same benefits will also apply to Fedora's online marketing efforts, including their Developer Interviews and Release Overviews.

Creating this plan still depends on overcoming a number of challenges. Foremost amongst these is understanding exactly what Fedora is, and what its target audience is. Recently Fedora has gone from being a simple distribution, to the upstream for an increasing number of projects. Thanks to its open build tools and custom re-spinning applications there are a growing number of custom spins, and other projects such as the Creative Commons LiveContent CDs and DVDs, as well as offerings from the Fedora Unity Project. Graphical tools such as Revisor have made re-spinning easy. Other Fedora derivatives, notably Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the OLPC, don't rely on the custom re-spinning applications, but do rely on Fedora source code to build their distributions.

To accompany this, and widening Fedora's mission even further is the newly launched beta of a service called Fedora TV. Its goals are to encourage the use and development of free media formats such as OGG Vorbis/Theora, PNGs and SVGs, as well as encouraging the continued development of the free software tools to create media in these formats.

This is not to say that Fedora is no longer focused on its core purpose of providing a distribution which showcases the latest and greatest free software has to offer. Fedora 9 (Sulphur) Alpha was released recently and a quick glance at its release notes shows a lot of interesting new features appearing. Along with the usual bundle of software updates, including KDE 4 and GNOME 2.21.4, a lot of attention has been given to Anaconda, Fedora's system installer. In particular Anaconda now has the ability to resize partitions as well as create and install the system on encrypted partitions. Also exciting is the inclusion of FreeIPA, a system which "... combines the power of the Fedora Directory Server with FreeRADIUS, MIT Kerberos, NTP and DNS to provide an easy, out of the box solution" for managing various auditing, identity and policy processes. If the events following Fedora 8's release are anything to go by, we can expect to see many of these features appearing in other distributions during the autumn 2008 and spring 2009 release cycles.

Also a significant challenge for the Fedora Marketing SIG is not just defining what Fedora is, but persuading people that they want to be a part of it. In the short term this means promoting the large amount of work that Fedora does upstream and making it as easy as possible for people to get involved by lowering their barriers to entry. In the long term this means, as Paul Frields, Fedora's new project leader, recently commented, overcoming the "... decline of volunteerism in the USA overall ..."

Of course, talk and good intentions are wonderful, but without practical results are meaningless. To this end the Fedora Marketing SIG is already beginning to pick up speed. Concrete, long term plans are being laid with the aid of Red Hat's professionals; and in the short term Fedora seems to be cropping up in popular news sites more often than it has done for quite a while. Fedora developers are gaining increased recognition for the work that they put in, which often shows up in other distributions. With the release of Fedora 9 (Sulphur) Alpha, and the increased attention that this received in comparison to previous early development releases, as well as an already impressive set of new features, the future seems bright.

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> Fedora is seeking to set itself on solid ground

Hey good!

> with a revitalised marketing effort
Damn.

These bastards decided to supplement vision and quality with marketing.

Never touch with a six foot pole again.

> These bastards decided to supplement vision and quality with marketing.
> 
> Never touch with a six foot pole again.

Heh, heh.  A typical response to the keyword 'marketing'.  Could you be an Eliza clone?

Of course, a spade is a spade, which is an idiom meaning, "Call something what it is."  

There are no open source projects that are alive and kicking that do not do marketing.

But if you'd rather dangle your fishing rod from behind the boat, go right ahead.  I'll bite.