Maybe open-source does actually need marketing and an appearance of quality and modernity to 'succeed', whether you like it or not. Code quality or complexity is often invisible and largely irrelevant to end-users (as long as the tool does the job), and it's a known fact of life that people are (at least initially) attracted to things that look good.

If I just look at myself as someone who's been using OSS for years, and absolutely depends on tools like gcc for my day-to-day work, even despite all that I still sometimes find myself discarding certain OSS software solutions I have no prior experience with, for nothing else but a crappy amateurish logo or an ugly website. I know it doesn't say anything about how good the software is, but somehow it's an instinctive reaction, which I think is pretty universal among humans.

In a broader sense, if you look at some of the reactions this article seems to trigger, I think you can safely see that tunnel-vision and a complete disregard of the differences between OSS developers and potential OSS users is a huge missed opportunity. You can be confident in the quality, complexity and utility of a piece of software whatever you like, but that doesn't 'sell' it to end-users.

If OSS wants broader acceptence and ever become a real-alternative to commercial software it needs superficial polish and marketing. This may not be relevant for compilers or debuggers, but it is relevant for tools facing non-developer end-users.

Nothing's preventing you or anyone else with good graphic sense to jump in the team and propose better logos. That's what OSS is about: sharing and improving each other's work.

That this was posted to make fun of the logos is one possibility, but I'd prefer to think that the poster might have wanted to simply bring attention to it. Knowing there's a problem is the first step toward resolving the problem, right?

I completely agree that the GNU projects are very useful. That said, no matter how useful and valuable a product is, all that value is simply lost if no one uses it. Making these projects more attractive to people not already familiar with them will help them to flourish the way that they should.

I think most would consider that at best a distraction.

More often then not overly flashy websites seem to look bad on my book. To me it seems more like they are trying to slip something under the rug while simple designs come across as more focused. Like http://prgmr.com http://tarsnap.com and http://nearlyfreespeech.net .

I agree, I'd rather have a website like http://www.slackware.com/ than any of that bootstrap stuff.

It is worth noting that the Slackware homepage hasn't changed much in almost 15 years. The only changed they seemed to have made is changing it from a white text on back background design to a black text on white background design very early on.

https://web.archive.org/web/19991117022152/http://slackware....

Why? The "bootstrap" stuff utilises modern, standards based semantic markup. The linked site is poor both aesthetically and technically.

Calling something "World's Worst" is, IMHO, not a very nice way to start a discussion about improving it.

> This is what happens when we believe that open-source needs marketing to succeed

It does, if you want it or not. A project that is not being marketed will not be successful. If you are suggesting that GNU has no marketing you're wrong. GNU might have marketing not everybody agrees with, but it has a lot of it.

> It does, if you want it or not. A project that is not being marketed will not be successful.

The homepage of vim, the editor every hipster who wants to look like a Unix greybeard tries to learn as if it were the holy grail of programming knowledge, has a very 1990s look. It also has more users than a lot of startup-published tools that claim to revolutionize how you do X.

There's no bootstrap landing page shit, no ads and no pitches. It finds users by word of mouth but there's very little actual advocating and no intentional conversion effort so as to deserve the word "marketing". No one tries to sell you vim, or make you open an account with it or anything else.

Same with emacs, autogen and emms and whatever.

> The homepage of vim, the editor every hipster who wants to look like a Unix greybeard tries to learn as if it were the holy grail of programming knowledge, has a very 1990s look.

But that's often not how people perceive vim these days because other channels have started filling the void. Vim's marketing these days is people referring the editor to others and letting them know how cool it can be.

Just because the original developer does not do marketing does not mean that other people won't fill the void. I for instance have been using vim for years and years and I'm very commonly showing off my vim setup to others at conferences and sharing my configuration online, tweeting screenshots etc.

Did it occur to you that people use vim because it's useful, and not just because they are hipsters who want to look like Unix greybeards?

> GNU might have marketing not everybody agrees with, but it has a lot of it.

Exactly. It's just a different type of marketing from the Bootstrap-powered, coffee-house-backdrop intro video with indie guitar: "Hi! My name's Rob! Sometimes, I need to cross-compile to an embedded..."

This has nothing to do with marketing, it's more a question of taste in my opinion. It's hard to argue that these logos don't all look extremely dated.