ATTN: White-paper authors
Do you publish PDF’s of marketing collateral showcasing free software?
I’ve noticed that not everyone eats their own dogfood!..
and There are some unlikely offenders.
There are plenty of ways to generate quality materials from free software. Below are some properties screens that let you know the creator cares about FOSS.
People dont just pay for propietary software with the price tag. You pay for it by looking like a dweeb who uses another platform to the one they promote:
The final irony here being that I took those screenshots in the linux version of acroread.
I test with acroread because printers render with the same output.
For everything else there’s poppler with evince
March 19th, 2007 at 11:00 am
I don’t get your point.
March 19th, 2007 at 1:12 pm
It was a micro-rant:
eat your own dogfood
Sorry to not have set the context.
March 19th, 2007 at 2:18 pm
I think the problem is most of these sorts of white papers will go through the marketing department and possibly even an (external) graphic designer before they’re published. So while the people who write the docs are (I’m sure) FOSS-people, marketing probably feels the need to “polish” them (and, ya know, replace technical content with buzz words and all the other good things marketing depts do). And the marketing people probably haven’t yet taken the time to learn how to get equally attractive output from the Free design tools - and lets be fair, even a few years ago it was difficult to get visually attractive results out of many of the Free tools. Inkscape, Scribus etc have matured enormously in the last 2-3 years.
Hugo.
p.s. Andy, did you get my email shortly after LCA? I didn’t hear back from you.
March 19th, 2007 at 6:21 pm
Yeah, I have an old example of the same: http://flickr.com/photos/nicubunu/68604281/
I did some noise at the time, got some people talking about it, including Bryce (who is at ODSL), and they learned, this year’s report is better.
September 2nd, 2007 at 9:16 am
Yes!!
DebConf6,
http://valessiobrito.info/projetos/debconf7/bizzarro_capa_dc6.png
DebConf7,
http://valessiobrito.info/projetos/debconf7/yes_SL_DC7.png
GreaT! Open Source!