LANT Distribution

LANT will not have any physical presence, and so would never be found in shops on CDs, etc. This will make distribution of LANT harder at the start, however it should be noted that LANT remains open-source and free, so the only drawbacks to it having a slow start would be profit-related, but rather not getting the feedback on the program's early stages, and the skinning/plugin community not expanding much.

However, because LANT is free, there will be more users interested in just trying it, and LANT is non invasive, meant to aid the user, and so they will likely keep it installed on their system.

Because of the nature of LAN Parties and how so many files are shared, LANT is likely to be shared or recommended at any party by someone who has encountered it. Therefore, the small-scale LAN Parties are seeming to be the starting ground for LANT.

After LANT has achieved some presence and made a name for itself, there is likeley to be a substantial online community of designers and developers for it, who will keep LANT continuously developing in between LANT's official releases or updates. Once LANT has been perfected enough, organisers of the larger LAN events would feel comfortable enough to integrate it into their scheme.

Eventually LANT's online presense will dominate what initially set out to be a local program, a single-user piece of software, and the small online presense would have heavily multiplied by the integration into big events where thousands of users could potentially hear about LANT. LANT would have enough of a developer community at this stage to keep it going for a long time, with plugins that could make LANT have extra modes/desktops, docks and other ways of interacting, and more. It is even possible the source code for LANT could be used to make other programs not focused at LAN Party goers, but instead, for example, at businesses or schools.

However, that is only a possible future that would happen from LANT's scalability and open-source architecture. But to start with, LANT would have a small online presense in the form of just one small distribution website, where users would be able to upload their skins/plugins and discuss LANT's initial development on the forums.

The initial website is designed to look like:



The layout and content is inspired by current software distribution/information websites such as:

Teamspeak....


... and Ventrilo


These websites offer summaries of their very successful products and easy access to help, social, and download sections, and so are an excellent source to use in the context of LANT. However, LANT doesn't have as much information to display at the start and so wouldn't have to be made to the scale these examples are.