dB

Carela Schroder summarises some interesting writings about FOSS and Windows users thus, "... Linux users are more tech-savvy and accustomed to the idea of being contributors, and Windows users are conditioned to being passive consumers with only two options for handling problems: yelling, or purchasing a different product. The foundation of Microsoft's core business plan is eliminating the second option, so Windows users get a lot of yelling practice. So a large influx of Windows users can swamp a FOSS project with demands but no help. Inkscape's Windows port has a larger userbase than its Linux version, but not a correspondingly larger contributor base." (emphasis mine)

This is important for us as our model really is to grow the contributor base of Pootle and VirTaal so that many hands are developing the tools.  For Pootle I think we are slowly moving in that direction as we had much help from GSoC and Mozilla people.  But Pootle is a server, so already there is a level of sphistication needed to install it.  Even though we dumb this down by supplying Debian and Fedora packages we are still getting useful contribution.  By useful I mean people who will create a patch or submit a sane bug report and work hard with you to diagnose a problem.

Now for our venture into end user applications with VirTaal we will have to see.  One of our goals is to make sure the application runs easily and well on Windows.  I have no doubt that Linux users, even the non-techie, will give good feedback. But on Windows I'm beginning to worry, we don't have the capacity to manage support requests for Windows problems.  This problem grows when you realise that because of the nature of Windows we end up bundling many different components, all of which are packaged seperately by a Linux distributions and thusnot our concern, and managing multiple platforms with a pretty arcane system of packaging.

We'll see how we do and see if we can learn to change users into contributors.