Thorium (ROS distribution) on kickstarter

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gonzoMD
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Re: Thorium (ROS distribution) on kickstarter

Post by gonzoMD »

Webunny wrote: Did we get a mention on slashdot?
http://slashdot.org/submission/3285261/ ... ickstarter
Aeneas
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Re: Thorium (ROS distribution) on kickstarter

Post by Aeneas »

Wow. ReactOS people, you are showing some serious advertising muscle. Impressive, I must admit. THAT's how you do it, bravo!
Jedi-to-be
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Re: Thorium (ROS distribution) on kickstarter

Post by Jedi-to-be »

Webunny wrote:
Been a while now since I was involved in it, but I could try to use my old contacts on slashdot to see if I can get a ROS/thorium mention in there, if no-one else has tried it yet...
This option was tried several times.

http://beta.slashdot.org/submission/321 ... ickstarter
http://beta.slashdot.org/submission/323 ... ickstarter
http://beta.slashdot.org/submission/324 ... ickstarter
janl
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Re: Thorium (ROS distribution) on kickstarter money fom EU

Post by janl »

What about use public money. We could send a mail to deputy in nationa Parliament or EuroMP. This deputies have some influence a public sector (great customer of Microsoft), Eu taxpayer pays to Microsoft big money. What is 100k Euro for europian Union. In projekt are involed people form EU countries (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, GB, Poland, ...). New elections for EU Parliament draws near (May 2014), EuroMP would like retain their (good paid) jobs.
janl
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Re: Thorium (ROS distribution) on kickstarter

Post by janl »

Over google translate, my mail to slovak EMP:
Dear Sirs / s Mrs / Mr MEP EU Parliament.

http://www.reactos.org is a long time trying to create an open source clone of the Windows operating system. On https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/th ... ud-desktop are ongoing collection on chat support of this project. Slovakia, as well as all EU members pay Microsoft a lot of money for their operating system. You could not use its influence and suggests that the EU supported this project - it could save a lot of resources.
Thank you for your valuable time,
Jan Liska
I forget to mention 100K $ - for EU very little money. If somebody else tries this way, would be good to mention for examle http://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/

Oroginal slovak mail (google translate may change sence of a mail):
Vazena/y pani/pan poslanec EU parlamentu.

http://www.reactos.org sa uz dlhsi cas snazi vytvorit open source klon operacneho systemu Windows. Na https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/th ... ud-desktop prave prebieha zbierka na podoru tohto projektu. Slovensko, ako aj vsetci clenovia EU platia firme Microsoft vela penazi za ich operacny system. Nemohli by ste vyuzit svoj vplyv a navrhnut, aby EU podporila tento projekt - mohlo by sa usetrit velke mnozstvo prostriedkov.
Dakujem za Vas drahocenny cas,
Jan Liska
Dave3434
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Re: Thorium (ROS distribution) on kickstarter

Post by Dave3434 »

i know this is a bit off topic but will cloud computing forced on us? i don't like using cloud serivces if i got idea wrong then please let me know? :?
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gonzoMD
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Re: Thorium (ROS distribution) on kickstarter

Post by gonzoMD »

Dave3434 wrote:i know this is a bit off topic but will cloud computing forced on us? i don't like using cloud serivces if i got idea wrong then please let me know? :?
No, Thorium Core is just ReactOS Distribution which makes this cloud stuff POSSIBLE.
Dave3434
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Re: Thorium (ROS distribution) on kickstarter

Post by Dave3434 »

o.k thanks as long as i have a choice i'm fine. :D
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Black_Fox
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Re: Thorium (ROS distribution) on kickstarter

Post by Black_Fox »

I asked a few Czech magazines whether they are interested in covering ReactOS Kickstarter, first article appeared:
http://extrawindows.cnews.cz/clanky/kom ... u-ma-sanci

A few points taken from the article:
- every second paragraph mentions that ROS is incomplete and not very usable
- it is said that missing print support is a showstopeer
- article says kernel aims at NT5.2 and userspace aims at NT6.2 (which is nonsense according to what Z98 said yesterday in some thread).
- final summary: even advanced and stable Linux has only 1-2% of desktop market, ReactOS will have a very hard life (if it is done in time at all)
helsinkiharbour
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Re: Thorium (ROS distribution) on kickstarter

Post by helsinkiharbour »

Black_Fox wrote:I asked a few Czech magazines whether they are interested in covering ReactOS Kickstarter, first article appeared:
http://extrawindows.cnews.cz/clanky/kom ... u-ma-sanci

A few points taken from the article:
- every second paragraph mentions that ROS is incomplete and not very usable
- it is said that missing print support is a showstopeer
- article says kernel aims at NT5.2 and userspace aims at NT6.2 (which is nonsense according to what Z98 said yesterday in some thread).
- final summary: even advanced and stable Linux has only 1-2% of desktop market, ReactOS will have a very hard life (if it is done in time at all)
Thanks for the article... but can't agree with the conclusion at all, pretty short-sighted. The conclusion should be way around: the advanced and stable linux proved that acceptance problems for alternative OS'es are not stemming from technical properties. What is a chance for ReactOS, which excels in the non-technical qualities were linux lacks (most propably in a non-fixable way, while the reactos technical shortcomings will be fixed over time).

Some feedback to the campaign: as it was also suggested in the kickstarter comments by several backers, more and more exciting rewards are required.
It might sound stupid but a exclusive Thorium (front)/reactos (back) t-shirt might be an good start (price level around 50-70$?). E.g. Mozilla had good success with T-shirts on one of their first firefox campaigns. Several companies offering cheap t-shirt production & distribution ... should be possible to organize (maybe even the Qwertee infrastructure can be used? http://www.qwertee.com/ additional buzz...)

Also, as potential high profile business user: someone could contact the Limux (http://www.muenchen.de/rathaus/Stadtver ... ntakt.html) folks about Thorium. Limux is currently one of the major migration success stories in public administrations away from Windows to open source solutions. As far as I followed their migration, it seems that for some accountant software they have still some XPs running in VMs which are used via terminals... more or less the Thorium use case ! As their original goal was to get 100% rid of windows, they might be very interested to catch also this corner-case...

And finally, here a semi-serious article of keywords required to achieve a successful kickstarter campaign, based on statistics of former kickstarter projects: http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/to-get ... agic-words
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Black_Fox
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Re: Thorium (ROS distribution) on kickstarter

Post by Black_Fox »

It seems that people either say "WINE does it well enough, so I stay on Linux" or they say "ReactOS does not do it well enough, so I stay on Windows"... I hope ROS team will learn from the Kickstarter mistakes and also from other Kickstarters' good ideas to improve the next attempt (or the upcoming updates, who knows). I recently backed another KS project that is created by a Czech Republic team of initially 25 people Kingdom Come... it's mostly incomparable because they are a team of highly experienced full-time developers licensing an already developed engine, but consider the KS presentation! Thorium could find inspiration in these.
helsinkiharbour
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Re: Thorium (ROS distribution) on kickstarter

Post by helsinkiharbour »

Black_Fox wrote:It seems that people either say "WINE does it well enough, so I stay on Linux" or they say "ReactOS does not do it well enough, so I stay on Windows"... I hope ROS team will learn from the Kickstarter mistakes and also from other Kickstarters' good ideas to improve the next attempt (or the upcoming updates, who knows). I recently backed another KS project that is created by a Czech Republic team of initially 25 people Kingdom Come... it's mostly incomparable because they are a team of highly experienced full-time developers licensing an already developed engine, but consider the KS presentation! Thorium could find inspiration in these.
But there is a third kind of people, the people who have not jumped to linux up to now and who are frustrated with the last MS Windows iterations. And there are MANY of them, they could be the enthusiastic audience for ReactOS. Also, there is enough space in the market for another "windows" OS, developers and hardware producers would support it...

Indeed, the "Kingdom Come" campaign is great ...

PS: the FAQ of the campaign needs to be significant extended... use these words ;)
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Black_Fox
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Re: Thorium (ROS distribution) on kickstarter

Post by Black_Fox »

helsinkiharbour wrote:But there is a third kind of people, the people who have not jumped to linux up to now and who are frustrated with the last MS Windows iterations. And there are MANY of them, they could be the enthusiastic audience for ReactOS.
Yeah, but some of them don't get to be shown the "operating system" concept, a lot of them don't even know about Linux and most of them don't know about ReactOS.
BTW, I've seen the Phoronix article about ReactOS and the forum responses were quite constructive and at least vaguely interested.

The most current issue is that there is no activity on the Kickstarter. No updates in 3 weeks, there are some good ideas in comments. I hope that after the Kickstarter a PayPal fundraiser will follow on ReactOS.org. The recent videos with Photoshop CS2 etc are very encouraging, guys! Is there any copyright law forbidding officially showing the apps running on ReactOS?
fred02
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Re: Thorium (ROS distribution) on kickstarter

Post by fred02 »

Black_Fox wrote:
helsinkiharbour wrote:But there is a third kind of people, the people who have not jumped to linux up to now and who are frustrated with the last MS Windows iterations. And there are MANY of them, they could be the enthusiastic audience for ReactOS.
Yeah, but some of them don't get to be shown the "operating system" concept
Agreed. I also think that they represent a good (may be even core) share of ROS final target audience, but unfortunately they cannot be targeted in ROS current state.
helsinkiharbour
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Re: Thorium (ROS distribution) on kickstarter

Post by helsinkiharbour »

fred02 wrote:
Black_Fox wrote:
helsinkiharbour wrote:But there is a third kind of people, the people who have not jumped to linux up to now and who are frustrated with the last MS Windows iterations. And there are MANY of them, they could be the enthusiastic audience for ReactOS.
Yeah, but some of them don't get to be shown the "operating system" concept
Agreed. I also think that they represent a good (may be even core) share of ROS final target audience, but unfortunately they cannot be targeted in ROS current state.
I think they could be targeted already, for the desktop use-case: first, ReactOS made good progress here recently, that office 2003 runs is very encouraging, Second, if you read the feedback on the kickstarter several (most?) supporter preferred to choose no reward as they were primarily interested in the desktop use case; similar responses I have read aound the web ("Why not directly ReactOS?"). Third, crowdfunding is about the vision of a potential product, not a already finished product. The vision is obvious and even impressive usage prototypes can be shown. I think the current state of ReactOS and time is exactly right for a kickstarter addressing the end-users.
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