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Please stick to the topic of this title and use email or the comp.lang.tcl newsgroup for debates -jcw
Robert Abitbol Noted. Thanks! Please let me know if what follows is acceptable.
Presentation
The goal is to put games written in TCl/TK in a CD and to sell the CD in various countries. While of course keeping all programs for free downloads.
Global task # 1: TCL/TK Games CD Project: Marketing feasibility Study
LV Can you describe a bit more what you mean? For instance, are you volunteering to do the work? What is the audience you are expecting? What is the plan for dealing with the money - is it personal profit, or is the money to be donated to a charity, or donated to a community cause, etc.?
I presume you plan to only include games for which you have signed (and notarized?) documents indicating that the signer is in fact the creator of the game. And of course, no game based on some licensed material (images, names, etc.) would be included without written permission from the license holder, right?
This is certainly something that can happen - a few years ago there was a CD produced called "Tcl Blast!", which took quite a lot of work, because the result had a wide variety of binary distributions on the disk.
Robert Abitbol Did it sell?
Hmm - jcw probably knows better than I how many copies went out. The primary uses of the CD were: a part of a conference goodies give away and a benefit to joining the Tcl Consortium. I don't recall - was it also included in a book or sold as well? Perhaps one of the other old-timers remembers.
Robert Abitbol Wow! Kernighan and Ousterhout on the advisory board. Very impressive!
Robert Abitbol (25 February 2005) I think that what is important is uniting our forces and go commercial so that we don't only end up "programming for programmers" but we also target the mainstream audience.
I'll gladly do the work - any work - and head or co-head the project or be a simple soldier. I am not after power, prestige, big titles and so forth. I'll go where I am needed the most, where I can do the best job.
Wikis are really a tool of choice for project management so using a wiki for this sort of project is really A1!
We'd go step by step, slowly but surely...
I believe the first step would be to start by the aspect we know the least: the commercial aspect namely make a preliminary exploration of the commercial ventures for the CD.
This is what we could do:
We'd first divide our efforts in countries or in states. One person would pick a country or a state.
We'd create pages on this wiki describing the contacts we have made in different countries: a page by country/state. We should concentrate on chain of stores, on distribution companies...
So we'd write follow-up pages called for example: "Marketing the Games CD in Canada F/Up", "Marketing the Games CD in the US F/Up".
We'd write what we have done concretely:
Example: Robert Abitbol (Friday 28 February 2005) I phoned Mr ... , buyer for Renaud-Bray a chain of ... libraries and software seller in the province of Quebec. I have an appointment with him on such and such date...
When this is done, if our preliminary commercial work proves to be fruitful, then we can go on to the next steps (one step at a time):
If the work on commercial channels proves to be fruitless, then it's not worth it. The project will end. Unless a few people decide to sell the CD locally...
Don't forget that if we discover marketing channels for the game pack, then we discover channels for all our products.
People are generally interested in this sort of games pack. They are reminiscent of these combos that have existed for decades. I remember when I was a kid, at Christmas, I got a combo wheel/cards to play all kinds of games including baccarat, roulette (not Russian Roulette though ... :-))