[MPlayer-dev-eng] Frost & Sullivan - Research into Digital Video Market

[Attila Kinali]

Hi,

On Fri, 1 Aug 2008 16:09:14 -0400
LukeRussell at frost.com wrote:

> My name is Luke Russell, I work within the Information and Communications 
> Technologies (ICT) practice at Frost & Sullivan, a market research firm 
> which specializes in tracking various technological industries.

I hope you are aware that you are dealing with an OSS project
and not with a comercial entity. Thus normal rules and behaviour
patterns that you know and are familiar with do not apply here.

If you have not done any research on how the OSS community works
and what the proper etiquette is, please do so. I especialy
recomment "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by Raymond, although
outdated and with a lot of mistakes, it explains the way how
OSS people work technically. The other book you should read is
"Just for Fun" by Torvalds and Diamond, which explains why OSS
people work that way.

And if you have not done yet, please read a guide on proper
mail quoting like those found in the second paragaph of our
mailinglist page:
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/mailing_lists.html
 
> Sending out this e-mail because we are currently doing research into the 
> market for Digital Video.  Was hoping to be able to talk to a relevant 
> individual at the MPlayer team

First thing to learn is, that there is no "relevant individual",
at least not in most projects. OSS projects are a heterogenus
conglomerate of different people who work on different parts
of the software for very different reasons. And if i say different
i mean different. The only common denominator is, that the reasons
hardly involve monetary rewards (at least not in the first place).

> about the teams perspective on this market, 
> and what they see as the major trends moving forward. 

I think you should first do some research who is using MPlayer
and for what reasons. You'll be surprised that the statistics
will look very different from anything a comercial company will tell you.
It will also change dramaticaly depending on who you ask.
Ie you have to be very carefull on how you choose your statistic sample.

And no, we do not have this data ourselves, because we are not that
much interested in who uses our software. (see above mentioned books
for a rational)

> The discussion we are hoping for would be more market based rather than 
> technically based.  Some of the topics we'd be interesting in discussing 
> include; directions which MPlayer is taking when it comes to video and 
> why?, current and expected future demand and market trends? comparisons 
> with other competitors in the market (quantitative and qualitative)?

So, you are hoping to discuss managment issues with a purely
technical bunch of people? Talking about "market" with a project
that doesn't exploit any market in the traditional, economic sense?
Future demand with a "product" that is not demand but contribution driven?
Comparison with competitors that share more than half our code base?
I think you have some misconceptions there.

> Please feel free to contact me if you need any clarifications, more 
> information can be found on our website www.frost.com. 

In the OSS field, people are normaly not contacted for clarification,
but questions are discussed openly right at the place where they pop up.

> Looking forward to talking to either yourself or another member of the 
> VideoLAN team in the near future. 

Hmm.. I think you forgot to change "VideoLAN" here :-)
And in case you might not know, VideoLAN are our friendly
French competitors who work together with us to make better
video players :-)

BTW: your legal disclaimer is pretty much void, as you send
your mail to a public mailinglist, read by thousands of people
all around the world, archived and made public again on dozens
of webservers.


				Attila Kinali


-- 
The true CS students do not need to know how to program.
They learn how to abstract the process of programming to
the point of making programmers obsolete.
		-- Jabber in #holo