New Open Source Community & Directory - makezero.com

Mon Nov 7 08:53:51 CET 2005

Hello,

I am writing you to let you know of a free new service which could help grow your distribution and also make you a little money as well (15% referral bonus).  A few weeks ago I launched a brand new website http://www.makezero.com to bring the open source community another tool to help spread its popularity and usage.  It was built to showcase the rapidly growing number of open source distributions in an as interactive way as possible.  Hopefully making those Windows users a little more curious about what we're doing over here.

Currently this website has more than 330 distributions listed which are known to be active still, including yours.  It is more than just a directory though.  Each distribution has a webpage built automatically for it that comes with historical release information, screenshots, user reviews, news articles, download mirrors, and even its own forum.  Future enhancements and tools are already in the works.  All of this of course is provided for free and requires no maintenance on your part.  We will do it all for you.  We already have more than 1200 screenshots and 1200 articles archived on the site and this number grows quickly each day.

This is not your typical website however.  The entire website was built completely from scratch using the latest browser technologies such as XML, DHTML, and AJAX to improve the responsiveness of it as much as possible.  This includes the forums, the onsite instant messaging system, and even the shopping cart.  There are a lot of features that are built into the site that are hidden initially, but become available once you create a free member account.  I do hope you will spare a few minutes of your time to create a member account to see what this site may offer to you and your distribution, and also to the open source movement in general.

This website goes a little further though and also comes with very detailed user profile pages which will try to help connect the many users of all 330+ distributions into one place.  Hopefully in a better way than your typical forum-based community.  It'll also help new users find other users with shared common interests as them in order to ease the transition to open source as easily as possible.  And of course, make new friends who know how to answer difficult questions.  It is very similar to myspace.com and those other popular community websites except that this one doesn't have any banner ads and is very modern.  But in this case it is targeted specifically at the open source crowd only.

You can also find here a very accurate XML based Ranking system in order to properly judge the popularity of every distribution and yours as well.  Each distribution is categorized so if you want to know what the most popular Live CD was on any particular day or time period then you just make a few selections and in a few seconds you'll find out.

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REFERRAL PROGRAM

Like with many projects, the key to its success now is to get people to use it and that is where you come in if you want to.  If more people use this type of website and how it tries to share the user base of each distribution, then more people will try and use your distribution as well.  So if you want to, you can link to us or just tell your friends about us.  We do have icons and images available of various sizes and of course text links are fine too.  I have already provided a link to your website from makezero.com for informational purposes and to give them the opportunity to locate a download mirror.  I know some of the larger projects don't really need any help, but my main intention of writing you was just to let you know that we're out there.

As an added bonus you can also get 15% referral bonus on a customer's entire shopping cart if they purchase anything on the website which came from a link on your website.  The system to keep track of referrers and the amount purchased by each customer is already in place.  Of course many of you don't need the money but it is there if you want it, or you can have it pooled into a fund to be donated to various deserving open source projects.  Most of you already have a PayPal donation link on your website so once a certain threshold is reached, I will simply just send you the money using that method unless you prefer to do it differently.

We provide our CDs at only $0.99 cents each and also give free shipping on orders over $20.00 (or $40.00 to non-USA countries).  What that means is many customers who see this $0.99 cent deal sometimes end up buying 50 to 100 CDs at once due to the low prices and because of the wide selection that we carry (nearly all 330 distributions are currently available for purchase).  That means if they spend $100.00 on the website, you'll get $15.00.  It's not much but it'll score you a pair of movie tickets.  It is very rare to find a place who will sell you 100 professionally labeled CDs for under $100 dollars with free shipping, but that's what we do here.

The shopping experience on this website is very sleek and is built on a very secure AJAX/XML/SOAP foundation in order to provide your users the safest and fastest online shopping experience as possible.  Orders are usually processed within 24 hours and just so you know, our standard CD we use to burn your distribution is on Taiyo Yuden media.  For those who also have distributions that fit on Mini-DVD, Mini-CD, and Business Card CDs, we automatically provide those media options for your users in case they prefer this format.  All in all, you have a very ideal and professional store to provide your users with in the event they cannot download and burn their own isos.  At the same time, you'll also help grow our community which hopefully will help further the growth of open source.

If you are interested in taking part of the referral program then feel free to contact me anytime at anpham at makezero.com.  Or you can just reply to this e-mail.  My personal goal is actually for a successful community site, and not a successful store.  But I had wanted a way of sustaining the sites costs without relying on banner ads so a store was built in its place.

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makezero.com is only a few weeks old so don't expect to see much community activity yet while you're there.  Your participation of course is vital if this site is to succeed so hopefully you will spend some time on it when you have a chance to see if you can make any use of it.  I am e-mailing all the maintainers of the other distributions as I am e-mailing you at this moment and hopefully we (or some of us) can join forces to somehow make the world of open source an easier transition for the next wave of open source addicts.

To get you started, here are some sample pages of what this site has to offer:

Distribution: http://www.makezero.com/Distribution.aspx?pid=55

Forums: http://www.makezero.com/forums/
        http://www.makezero.com/forums/Topic.aspx?id=1

Member Profile: http://www.makezero.com/member/Profile.aspx?id=1313

Rankings: http://www.makezero.com/rankings/Default.aspx?df=2005-10-31

Respectfully,

An Pham
anpham at makezero.com

http://www.makezero.com

P.S. - This website uses the latest browsers enhancements in order to provide the best possible experience.  It was built to attract the Windows crowd to try out an open source distribution.  It is highly recommended that you use newer version of Mozilla / Firefox / IE before you visit this website.  If you have any questions or suggestions then feel free to contact me at anytime.