> But I've told you before, Debian (despite the nifty new installer) is
> not a distro I would recommend to people who don't have experience
> with Linux distros. That's why they make things like Linspire and
> Mepis and Xandros, all of which are based on Debian. The installs are
> nice and GUI, and you're asked a minimum of hard questions. They have
> little one-click software installers that make it easy for users to
> install or upgrade software.
And Warren is now dedicated to making MEPIS 100% compatible with Debian
unstable and at least "mostly compatible" with stable instead of trying
to move away from the Debian "core" to increase uniqueness. There's been
a strong learning curve here for him in a business sense over the last
two years. The biggest lesson is that all the marketing people who say
they will make him millions and save him all sales effort if he lets
them distribute his work through retail channels as a boxed product are
full of [redacted], but that plenty of folks are willing to pay a
reasonable subscription fee for access to reliable MEPIS servers full of
apps that all work together nicely, plus maybe some nice add-on
utilities and intelligent menu defaults and pre-installed themes,
backgrounds and such, and some popular non-free apps like Flash,
RealPlayer, Adobe's pdf reader thing included and ready to run -
basically everything in place for a complete "consumer-level" computer
experience *plus* the option of dipping into the Debian pool instead of
being confined to the MEPIS app pool.
In other words, sell convenience. But don't wall off the deep end of
the pool, just have a little marker that tells where it begins so
non-swimmers don't get in over their heads by mistake. Use the power of
the MEPIS user community to decide what apps should be on the "simply"
CD, which should be on additional CDs, and which ones work well enough
that even if they aren't popular enough to be on the CDs, should be on
the MEPIS servers and can be supported by Warren and his (now 2, soon 3)
coworkers.
End result = MEPIS is maturing into a small, niche company that will
never take the world by storm, but will provide a decent income level
for its founder and employees and allow them to spend most of their time
doing what they like and dealing with nice people instead of being
controlled by marketers and investors who put them under constant
pressure to make millions -- for the marketers and investors.
An interesting experiment....
- Robin
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