[Hamara-devel] Have a hamaralinux-desktop theme which is publicly available to any desktop

[shirish]

Hi all,
I have been thinking of having a public hamaralinux-desktop theme which 
could be posted on various desktop themeing websites as well as in 
GNU/Linux distributions. The features below would make such a public 
theme :-


a.Highly functional
b.Licenced as a GPL/GPLv2 or/and GPLv3
c.Also housed under git.hamaralinux.org
d.Separate from our official hamaralinux.org branding.

When should we do this is upto us but would like that we do this after 
we have the new, improved site. I would be filing a bug right after this 
mail is sent using the mail I sent last week for people to get into 
history of that, the bottom being we get a good functional responsive site.

What are the expenses and any expected blow-back to us ?

As far as blow-back is concerned don't see any other than "some" people 
talking that we are taking a cheap shot at advertising ourselves but 
don't see any bad in that. The other is/could be nobody notices us which 
we could always use as a reminder and lesson to make it better and see 
what the competition is.

We have to keep in mind that Opensuse Linux pulled a much more racy 
strategy when it was young. For over 2-3 years that had various ladies 
in lingerie as the desktop wallpaper as well as in calendar which got 
them a bit of notoriety in the early years (this was in late 90's or 
early 2000s). As compared to that, we are behaving quite the gentleman 
here.

As far as expenses go, shouldn't be much vis-a-vis what we are spending 
now and then, as it would be the same theme minus our branding. There 
may be initial expenses as in time investment but if and when we do 
that, The goal should be to be in many sites as well as desktop 
distributions as possible. An example of such a site would be 
gnome-look.org. Such sites and GNU/Linux distributions galore. Even if 
we target the top 5 GNU/Linux distributions and use alexa to find top 5 
third-party GNU/Linux desktop theme distribution sites, our job would be 
half-done.

The rest would be putting some content about the site, curating our 
content on those sites and improving the looks from tips and ideas of 
people. This could also be mirrored on github and let people make pull 
requests and we could gauge on the skills of the artists-developer/s .

Precedence - Is there a precedent for such kind of thing.

Sure, there is. In-fact Debian does it. See 
https://www.debian.org/logos/ to learn about the difference between the 
'Open use logo' and the 'restricted logo'.

Look forward for feedback on the above.
-- 
Regards,
Shirish Agarwal,
Community Lead,
Hamaralinux.org