> 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?
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are due to misconceptions or outdated information, and how many of them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?
3) Whether it's fit for task. Is the software I want to run compatible
with Fedora? If I want to use a newer version than is shipped with
Fedora, is that a straightforward and supported operation? Does Fedora
include the correct library versions to work with the proprietary
applications I want to deploy? How do we ensure that Ubuntu isn't the
only supported platform for interesting third-party applications?
* How can this be done while supporting our foundations?
1) Freedom. We should never ship non-free software, but that's
compatible with ensuring that users who make a conscious and informed
choice to run non-free software are able to do so. I don't see any
problems here.
2) Friends. Broadening our appeal allows us to create a larger and more
diverse community. Again, I don't see any problems here.
3) Features. Why choose Fedora over anything else? Because we support a
wide range of features, and because we implement them properly. This is
one of our sellings points.
4) First. This may be the biggest source of difficulty. As Matt pointed
out, there's a tension between our desire to be a project where people
can make significant changes to land new features or where we can
incorporate the very latest version of upstream code and our desire to
produce a product that can be relied upon by normal users. This isn't
necessarily unresolvable. For example, can we make it easier for
upstream to distribute their code for Fedora, allowing users to obtain
new versions directly? Can we provide opt-in incubators for new
features, allowing new development without risking compromising the base
system?
--
Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org
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