[arc-discuss] Indiana, Nevada, FOSS packages, and ARC ... a proposal....

[Tim Bradshaw]

On 26 Apr 2008, at 01:01, Garrett D'Amore wrote:
>
> IMO, a better example would be why we don't have KDE and AfterStep and
> FVWM and XFCE....  clearly those packages are useful to a large number
> of people -- in some cases probably *far* more people would be  
> thrilled
> by the inclusion of KDE or XFCE than by e.g. unison or lftp.  (In  
> other
> words, the feature gap of not having those DEs is probably far more
> painful to a larger number of users.)

A question related to that, which I hope someone is asking is: how  
many of the people clamouring for, say, KDE, actually translate to  
people who would pay for support, and conversely how many people who  
pay for support want KDE?  It's very easy to get sidetracked by the  
huge number of people who just *must* have whatever window-dressing is  
fashionable this week but have no intention of ever contributing  
either time or money towards anything, and ignore the people who will  
actually keep the effort afloat if you provide what they need because  
they are not so good at whining.

Another angle on this, specifically thinking about desktop stuff is:  
what, realistically, is the chance of any OpenSolaris-based system  
*ever* having any significant market share on desktops?  What is the  
chance of it having a significant market share on infrastructure  
systems?  What, therefore, should people be focussing on?  Desktop  
stuff?  Yeah, right.

--tim