Marketing GNOME vs. Marketing GTK+

Today is a historic date for Free/Open Source software. It is the day Mozilla Firefox 1.0 was released to the world. Internet Explorer, its “competitor,” is still the most widely used browser on the net but Firefox, which has already conquered the hearts and minds of web developers, is also slowly making its way into the hard drives of regular people. More importantly I believe that it is also acting as an ambassador for F/OS software. It is showing that F/OS software is alive, relevant, and credible. So while I’m glad that today the world was made aware that it has the option not to use a crappy browser, I’m also especially happy to see the idea that software is not just whatever Microsoft made Dell or Gateway ship with their computers strengthened by this particular event.

And now, on to GNOME stuff. These past few days I’ve had no time to work on the GNOME marketing tasks I had set for myself. But I’ve had time to consider some ways to reach a broader audience and one thing became clear to me while reflecting on Firefox and OpenOffice’s recent good fortunes: the best way to market GNOME is to forget about marketing it.

Like GNOME, Firefox and OpenOffice are useful, functional, well designed, usable pieces of software – with varying degrees of success of course but that’s not the point. GNOME is unique though in that it works on operating systems which, though full of qualities, are minority systems. Microsoft Windows has roughly 95% of the desktop market and Mac OS X 3%. Linux, the BSDs and Solaris – all GNOME systems which I’ll just refer to as Unices from now on – have the rest.

The good news is that much of the market, Microsoft’s share specifically, is up for grabs. Linux has shown that it could occupy a significant percentage of the market in the server space. Many believe that it could do it again with the desktop market. I, of course, believe it too. The bad news… well, I suppose it is that there’s a long road ahead. The bad news for GNOME is that it can’t go anywhere on its own and that it’s dependent on the success of its host operating systems. That unfortunate fact is something the GNOME marketing team cannot ignore and which will always limit it. So what can it do?

I believe that it should shift its efforts from marketing GNOME to marketing GTK+. The “GIMP Toolkit” happens to be one of the elements of GNOME’s technical foundation but it’s also more than that. It’s a complete multi-platform toolkit. Clearly only a very specific segment of the population has any use for a GUI toolkit but what matters is that this segment exists within the full desktop operating system market and not only within the 2% or so of the current GNOME host operating system market. By promoting GTK+ the GNOME marketing team would increase its target audience significantly and instantly. That’s already something to consider. But there’s more.

The GNOME marketing team ought to think about how to best use its limited resources: it could try to market GNOME and find itself selling Unices instead or it could market GTK+ and use that initiative to show off GNOME and draw people to it. Scenario #1 involves getting into the complexities of selling a platform radically different from the dominant one. That means addressing issues like hardware support, switching costs, transfer of custom software, and all that icky stuff. I believe that’s a job best left to vendors. Let RedHat, Novell, or Sun do the heavy lifting since they can’t afford not to do it.

Scenario #2 involves promoting something the team is familiar with and which it can manage. For the most part it’s about developers talking to developers whereas in the first scenario you’d have to address a wide audience – managers, admins, end-users, etc. – on a variety of topics. So not only would the former path require greater sophistication and research, it would also require more volunteers and more efforts. With the GTK+ option, the message is simpler and probably truer to GNOME’s core constituency.

Marketing GTK+ is not only important because of the interest it could create in GNOME; it’s also crucial because it will increase the number of people writing for the platform. While GTK+ is not “the GNOME development platform,” it is the closest thing to it and bridging the gap between the two will be easier than having people making the jump all at once. The importance of GNOME and GTK+ bindings in reaching this goal should be obvious to anyone familiar with the platform. That is certainly the case of the Mono guys who have, better than anyone else I believe, understood the necessity to create a GNOME-friendly multi-platform culture. To some they might have made controversial political decisions. To me, they have adopted exactly the right kind of attitude.

This proposal is obviously a bit twisted. I’d be asking people to work on one thing when they’re really interested in working on another. But I’m convinced that it’s the most efficient way to go: GTK+’s target audience is much much much greater than GNOME’s at the moment, it is homogenous, the marketing team is familiar with it, and as for the message to communicate, focusing on GTK+ is probably much more straightforward than dealing with GNOME and the platform issues.