So I was studying my marketing textbook and I realized that Free Software has an awful reputation because of bad marketing. The software is, for the most part, technically sound, however the image of it is awful. This then reminded me of EventCal, the Python HTML calendar generator that I wrote a few years ago. I still get emails about it once in a while, even though I'm not actively maintaining.
So instead of studying, I created a quick checklist on what a Free Software website should have in order to be considered helpful by users. I won't post that list here just yet, because I want to write up a few other checklists and notes on marketing.
Here are the results of the change:
Old
New
About the marketing...it just bugs me that I can only point to programmer tools as examples of great work when talking about Free Software. Sure Firefox is fairly impressive, but what about The GIMP and OpenOffice and Inkscape? Not so impressive. Some of that has to do with the technical stuff, but most of it has to do with the lack of good marketing. Not enough tutorials, documentation, contact/support/contributor information, etc. etc.
