One thing about open-source software that bothers me and, apparently, plenty of others too, based on the fact that this story has gotten 704 diggs so far, is how many open-source projects seem to market themselves to geeks and developers. Yesterday, I wrote about how KDE 4 did the marketing right, advertising the features users care about not the features developers care about. Today, a different post (Here is the original post, the site went down but the post is pasted into a comment at Digg.) that talks about how Ubuntu could improve their release marketing received a lot of attention. I absolutely agree that Ubuntu (and other projects) should make their marketing more eye-catching and user friendly and I came up with a possible way to make this happen in the future.

Open-source software is all about the community doing everything openly, so it seems to make sense to ask the community to come up with the text (and pictures) of a user-friendly release announcement. Instead of having one person write it all, though, I think anyone who downloads and tries the beta/RC releases should be encouraged to write a paragraph (and optionally include a screen shot) about their favorite feature of the new release. This way the users can write the release announcement for the users instead of the developers trying to write the release announcement for the users.

The submissions could than be voted on and compiled into a release announcement that would advertise the coolest features, not the boring features. Additionally, that same material could be used again in other promotional material.

I suspect someone else will have an even better idea than mine, but at least this post should get the ideas rolling. Hopefully, by the time Hardy Heron is due to be released, this problem will be solved and the amazing features of Ubuntu, or any other distro, will be shown to everyone.