LCA2009: Publicising a FOSS project

By Sam Varghese
Monday, 19 January 2009 12:20

Opinion and Analysis

Some years ago, when journalists made the switch to public relations, it was generally the case that their vocabulary underwent a dramatic switch.
These days when it happens there is little change, simply because most journalists already sound like PR machines.

Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier, the senior manager for community relations at the "mixed source company ", Novell, spoke at the Australian national Linux conference today, outlining how, in his opinion, free and open source software projects should be promoted.

To a large extent he works with the OpenSUSE project, Novell's community distribution, but he also does work for other Novell projects such as Mono, the attempt by GNOME co-founder and Novell vice-president Miguel de Icaza to create an open source version of Microsoft's .NET development framework.

Brockmeier's approach to publicity, sadly, mirrored outdated thinking predicated on stereotypes - which shows how little someone who claims to have been a journalist in a previous life actually knows and understands about the profession.

He was a writer with the website Linux.com and also an editor; he has also written for other websites before he took up his current billet.

But let's go through some of his spiel first. Some of the benefits of promoting FOSS projects, he said, were attracting new users and new contributors. A project had to become popular before any of the better-known Linux distributions picked it up, hence the need for gaining users.

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