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List:       kde-promo
Subject:    Re: [kde-promo] KDE in the Brazilian Government (long)
From:       "Kurt Pfeifle" <kpfeifle () danka ! de>
Date:       2003-09-11 9:31:55
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Roberto Selbach Teixeira wrote:

> Should I read it or should I not?
> =================================
> 

Turns out, it was a "must-read"...  ;-)

> Well, this email will describe a meeting I had yesterday with the 20
> top decision makers of a the IT area of the Brazilian government and
> what were their impressions on KDE.

Thank you very much for this detailed report. It is an inspiration
to everyone contributing to KDE. It is also an inspiration to those
who are in similar talks and discussions with possible "converts",
albeit maybe not on such a high level.

> It's not all that much.

;-)

> So if you
> care about such things, read on, otherwise, go code or something
> similar :-)

[.... lots of interesting details skipped ...]

> We spent the whole afternoon exploring KDE. The result was
> fabulous. They are considering migrating 1.300.000 users to KGX within
> two years. Their major problem is that they will have to port some
> applications they have now. But KDE impressed them greatly.
> 

One excellent promo tool is the current Knoppix-Live-CD. Maybe it is a
good idea to start a little project in creating a KDE-3.2 Live CD?

It could be based on the work done for the occation of CeBIT in March
this year mainly by Ralf. (2.000 CDs were pressed at the time, sponsored
by credativ (the company Ralf works for) and DANKA (the company I work
for), and around 3.000.- EUROs were raised for e.V. by giving them away
in exchange for a donation. It was based on the idea of Knoppix, using
a few tools developed for Knoppix, but build from scratch on the basis
of Debian Woody, with  backported packages only (to avoid the mix of
stable, unstable and testing).

Ralf, are you listening?

> Of course, the war is yet to be won.

True. And we have not yet rearmed ourselves sufficiently...  ;-)

> I will be travelling to Brasilia
> (our capital) again in two weeks. They want me to actually go prepared
> for a KDE presentation to a less technical audience.

Again, it would be ideal to give Live CDs to such an audience, and show
them how these can be used even for *real work*. I know that this can't
be achieved within two weeks.

But it would be extremely useful to have such an iso image available
after every major KDE release. It requires, of course, maintainers and
testers, contributors, packagers, documentation writers.

I expect a lot more of these magnificent opportunities as Roberto
described coming up in the near period in many different parts of
the world....

> Also, they still
> have some internal problems to address before the migration can be
> started. Btw, do we have a business card template so that I can get
> some printed here? I remember that someone was seeing to it some
> months ago...
> 
> One more thing, they were curious about some issues of development. We
> talked about how the development in the free software world worked and
> they said they will probably contribute to KDE in the future if
> everything goes well. They are very fond of developing whatever
> features they don't have in some software (remember that most of what
> they use is developed by themselves) and I told them that they only
> have to gain by contributing. They seemed to agree. :-)
> 
> I'll tell you more when more happens. In the meanwhile, cross your
> fingers, we may have 1.300.000 new users shortly ;-)
> 

There is still a long way to go. They will need to receive a lot
of support and info and "hand-holding". Maybe it is a good idea to
forge an alliance of all forces (individuals, companies, foundations...)
who could have an interest in this. Is Conectiva already involved?

> Roberto.
> 

Cheers,
Kurt


 
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