Promoting openSUSE in Indonesia sometimes pretty hard and in another time is quite easy. Looks like a humor 😉 but it’s true. Why ?
Problem
There is a number of problem for promoting openSUSE. It’s not about openSUSE itself. In general it has a relationship with problem while promoting and implementing open source application in Indonesia. Most of the problem related with the point of view about open source. It’s about open source mindset. Some people usually asked, “is this quite easy to migrate our existing system into openSUSE ?”.
The piracy issue is the second largest problem. People used Windows application because they used it with piracy license. There is no license cost. It’s not for personal used only. Some of them are a company that should be used a legal license. In the past, I’ve found that various company, from small to medium company currently used piracy product for their system. If we asked them, “Hey, why don’t you buy a license for your commercial used ?”, the answer is, “It’s too expensive for us.”
“And why don’t you used open source application ?”, the answer is : “It’s too hard to configure and not work out of the box”
So, it’s about their mindset. Indonesian government has initiated a program called IGOS, Indonesia goes Open Source. The efforts made by governments in addressing software piracy through sound policy initiatives, educational outreach and enforcement programs successfully bring a significant reductions in piracy issue last year but it would need a long time without the efforts of open source community.
Solution and the Promotion Tricks
Indonesian openSUSE initiated on July 2007. In the beginning it was started with a few openSUSE lovers but after 2-3 months, the user increase significantly. I believe that the key of successful community is a number of user. With huge users, you can get much tutorial, how to and documentation, and vice versa : with much tutorial, you will reached more users.
Here is what we have done to promoting openSUSE :
- Building local community. We released our blog as online place for discuss, giving information and write the tutorial
- Create various communication media. Its’ about mailing list, forum and IRC chat
- Released online support volunteer project. The online support dedicated to helped openSUSE lover beside their daily work. The online support member was taken from active community member.
- Offering free email account with opensuse-id.org domain. It will bring non openSUSE users to heard a news about our activity. We used Google Apps for this.
- Offering free blog hosting http://blogname.opensuse-id.org. We used WordPress-MU for this and hosted on my personal Dreamhost account
- Making brochure, leaflet and openSUSE flyer. An example of our brochure could be found here. we have successful result by providing and distributing free CD with packaging brochure. The brochure contains information about openSUSE project, openSUSE product, our activity and openSUSE in the future. Sometimes, we also included a history of openSUSE and an information about agreement between Novell and Microsoft that usually asked by our new member
- Build local mirror. Local mirror required for faster online update. Primary repository at http://download.opensuse.org usually difficult to reached from Indonesia, especially on work hour. We have an existing local mirror located at University of Indonesia, but the mirror didn’t updated as expected.
- Writing tutorial, how to and news update at personal blog of openSUSE members. One of my blog feeding by popular IT aggregator and it was the second biggest referrer after Google search
- Social Bookmarks and Community. Digg it, Technorati, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook is an example of popular social bookmark and community.
With all of promoting tricks, writing tutorial and how to is the best promoting tips. User need the documentation while applying openSUSE to fit with their requirement. The more we could provided tutorial, the bigger user we could get in.
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What a great effort. What I would like to add is that reducing the frustration factor of things “not working out of the box” must be the biggest obstacle in reaching wide adoption. Here are two ways to overcome the perception that opensuse does not work out of the box:
1. Recommend system configurations that you know are very openuse friendly. When I purchased my laptop, I looked at the exact system hardware that Lenovo used for its opensyse factory-installed laptops. Then I found the exact same hardware combination in the “refurbished” section of the US Lenovo website and purchased one that has Windows XP on it. I obtained a copy of opensuse 10.3 and installed it with dual boot. In the end, it still took me a weekend to get it just right and my wireless still does not want to connect to open wireless networks, only my WPA network at home.
2. Link out to the and support the hardware vendors who are making available factory installed linux . You can now buy a new Dell desktop or laptop with Ubuntu in the US. You can buy a opensuse laptops or desktops from Lenovo. I think HP has partnered with Red Hat. So, there are lot’s of choices, but the hardware vendors are not exactly advertising that they have these systems available. At least that is the situation here in the US. In any case, you can also benefit from reviewing and learning from the hardware selection they used in their new systems as I did. In most cases you have to search google or the vendor sites to find these systems.
Hi Erik,
Thank you for the suggestion. I really appreciated.
The suggestion looks pretty interesting. Maybe I could write a regular review about compatibility hardware or a set of PC/laptop that worked out of the box with openSUSE.
Great way of promoting a distribution. What suse really needs now is a great forum to support the people using it. I hope that the new forums live up to the expectations. Take a look at ubuntuforums. It is openSource. I don’t think they would mind borrowing some ideas.
> Take a look at ubuntuforums. It is openSource.
The openSUSE Forums will use the same software but vBulletin is not Open Source.
I thought about putting up a site on MySpace, or whereever, and providing information about my computer, along with step by step instructions and screenshots on how I installed and configured my computer with openSUSE. My computer, I believe, looks and works really nicely. So I would be helping others configure theirs the same way! Of course I would recommend buying openSUSE, and maybe give a disclaimer that it may not work on all hardware. I would also like to provide a link to an HCL. This would provide useful information to people who’ve never installed openSUSE where an install fest may not be possible.
I’m hoping that by doing so, I can show off how easy the 1-click tools are to use. Readers may also want to know how to download (1-click) Emerald themes from http://www.compiz-themes.org, and where to get skydome images, e.g. http://www.flickr.com/groups/equirectangular/pool/.
What I meant was: Download the Emerald theme to the desktop and import it into the theme manager without having to compile the code.