Rockbox General > Rockbox General Discussion

Releases and website behaviour...

(1/6) > >>

Angyman:
So first thing to mention: this is just for proposal.. i dont want to argue or something...

I follow the rockbox progress now over three years or so. I am that kind of guy more related to project management than programming itself. In fact i work together with lots of programmers and now a little bit about the problems which are connected to a project in the size and in the manner of rockbox.

But without trying to appear as a "i know everything guy"  i think it harms the project that:
1. The website is too much developer orientated on the first sight
2. And i think it would help the project to focus back on stable releases

Really, right now you never now what happens to your player if you update to a newer build. Always some problems can be expected. There is now overview for a customer which essential progress really has been done without following the rockbox project frequently and reading through the forums and/or following and understanding the subversion commits. An unexperienced user who enters the rockbox site is definetly scared about all the geek stuff in here and it will be possibly end more in the result that he or she wont tryout rockbox on their player. A little bit of more explanation what rockbox is and how easily it can be installed on a device would be helpfull especially on the front page. I really think that the focus on a stable build and short release cycles by concentrating on an iterative step by step cycle, reagarding the most developer and customer needs, would help. The marketing part of rockbox is really nearly down to zero. Thats definety true. I know that there was a request for a website redesign which vanished in the depths of the forums and i really would love to make an proposal but up to the next two months i am really out of time ressources. I'll make one if nothinghappens until then. But i really think that marketing is an urgent problem of rockbox...

Over an out...

Llorean:
Exactly why is marketing a problem? Who are we selling to?

The people we want to attract are the geeky ones. We get more from one new developer than we do a hundred or a thousand new users, unless those users happen to refer a developer.

But really, what I see here is simply "you guys should do all this, but I can't help, I'm just saying what you should do."

bluebrother:
There are no customers. There is no product. Period.

Rockbox is simply an(other) open source project, and while it's nice to have users we don't need them to continue with the project. Arguing about loosing or not gaining users is simply ... pointless. Besides, getting more users means more support questions, and this means less time to work on the project. So depending on your point of view it also could be *better* to have less users.

AlexP:
If you would like to work on some sort of "marketing" campaign, then by all means make some proposals etc.  But as the others have said, Rockbox isn't trying to sell anything.  It is of course great that so many people use and enjoy Rockbox, but ultimately developers do it for themselves, and the fact that so many others use it is a happy side effect.

Bagder:
Some numbers from real-life that I think indicates that Rockbox is already a rather successful project:

* More than one million downloaded zips per year from build.rockbox.org alone. Add custom builds and downloads servers to that and I suspect we are at two million or more.

* www.rockbox.org site has some 12000 "visits" per day

* we are recognized by ohloh.net to be one of the largest open source teams in the world (counted by the number of committers the last 12 months)

I'm all for figuring out new ways to make us seen more and appear more favourable to the general public, but I don't see any particular need to.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page