Re: What is success for Fedora?

On 6 July 2014 11:51, Matthew Garrett <mjg59@srcf.ucam.org> wrote:

On Tue, Jul 01, 2014 at 11:16:33AM -0400, Josh Boyer wrote:

> The Board is starting this thread to have an earnest discussion around
> what people see "success" being for the Fedora project.  Hopefully the
> Board members will chime in with their own thoughts soon, but we want
> to get as many ideas around this as possible.  Hopefully this
> discussion will help the Board, and the community as a whole, gather
> some insight as to where we think Fedora is, where it should be
> heading, and what we should be doing to get it there.

For me, Success for Fedora is building products that are viewed as
natural choices for deployment in their target markets, without
compromising our foundations in the process.

Breaking that down:

* What causes something to be viewed as a natural choice?

1) Mindshare is an important part of this. How effective have we been at
advertising Fedora outside the enthusiast market? Ubuntu has been
successful amongst people on the crossover between the enthusiast and
mainstream markets, and word of mouth then does a good job of spreading
them further. Why have we failed to achieve the same?

I realize I have selection bias here, but many of the things seen as 'crossover wins' for Ubuntu have been items that would compromise what many see as fundamental foundations: no close source code, no out of tree drivers, avoiding patent software, and other tools. There is also that the developers we have are mostly in the enthusiast crowd and there is always a lot of angst that moving towards mainstream will lose the core people who work on the product.

 

2) Reputation is also a factor. If people's perception of Fedora is of
something that can't be relied on, it doesn't matter how much mindshare
we have. How do we measure the quality of our reputation? How do we
identify the factors contributing to that reputation? How many of those
are due to misconceptions or outdated information, and how many of them
are legitimate failings in our processes?

Misconceptions and outdated information are pretty much stuck with you across generations. It is how humans survive by holding onto information about what bit them 20 years ago so they don't see their kid get bit by the same thing. Basically if your brand is 'tainted' there in a large enough setting, there isn't anything you really can do with it beyond focusing on the community that stuck to you and then waiting for the other community to age out of remembering their bites in hopes they will try it again. [This is basic social psychology and marketing 101. ] 

Generations in computers seem to be a lot faster but it does mean that while the number one preconception Fedora has against it isn't Selinux anymore... it is dropping Xen and pulseaudio. I expect that in 2018, the top question outside people will still be asking if that systemd ever took off while the developers are fighting with Lennarts new creation: in-brain bootups. 

--

Stephen J Smoogen.