Still, it's a matter of marketing, which FOSS for the most part totally blows at.
Good products know how to sell themselves to new users. Most FOSS projects seem to only know how to sell themselves to existing users.
... except the ones that just alienate their existing users and lead to projects like Cinnamon. And also have no net gain in users because they're still also bad at selling themselves to new users.
Good technology means nothing. Bad technology that everybody knows about is going to be used far more often than good technology that nobody knows about.
Posted Mar 21, 2012 6:23 UTC (Wed) by elanthis (guest, #6227)
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Not a single link you just posted in any way proves or disproves anything I said. Seven sites does not indicate a trend. Especially when your examples for proprietary software were all items that literally just about every single damn computer user on this planet already knows about and need no introduction, so to speak. :)
Cinnamon 1.4 released
Posted Mar 20, 2012 7:23 UTC (Tue) by epa (subscriber, #39769)
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The marketing to end users is done by Linux Mint itself. At the level of source code for an individual project, the target 'market' is other developers and system packagers, not end users. So they need less handholding.