(warning: some of you have seen this rant before) Mike McGrath (mmcgrath@xxxxxxxxxx) said: > What is our target market supposed to be? We don't have one! Seriously, I have yet to see anything that shows that we have a coherent market, a plan for attack, or *anything* along those lines. So, we muddle along. Since no one has a plan or a target market, we implement whatever features the developers happen to think of, or random features vaguely relating to future enterprise development. Or we just incorporate the latest upstream. Since no one has a plan, and we don't target any market, we never have dedicated resources to do large amounts of cross distro work. So, we continue to have things like system-config-network and NetworkManager working in direct conflict for going on how many releases now? Since no one has a plan, and we don't target any market, we just continue to ship the same-old same-old distribution. Development tools? Gotta have those, they were there before? Two or three desktops? Well, wouldn't want to lose any users. And we need all the servers too. Whatever you can say about Ubuntu, they had a coherent, directed, plan, and they executed. We have no user-visible plan, and I think it shows. But does Fedora have any goals? Maybe we want to trumpet the customizability of Fedora, and focus on highlighting user-contributed spins. If so, we should be focusing all our efforts on creating web frontends, getting storage together, writing bits for people to rate these spins, etc. Maybe we want to investigate the online, connected destkop, and the possible creation and use of open service frameworks. Then we should start heavily investigating in infrastructure to host these apps and people's data. We should start working on rolling out open-source backed versions of popular online services (mail, chat, flickr, blog, etc), and working heavily with legal to enter this space with a *truly* open policy about how the user owns their own data, how to truly not be evil, etc. Maybe we want to trumpet Fedora'a ability to be ported to seconday arches and portions of the embedded market. Then we need to heavily invest in storage for contributed ports, cross-compiling support for all of our software, and so on. Maybe we just want to expand the reach of Fedora and drive more users to the Fedora userbase. Then we need to start investing heavily in targeting large markets, figuring out what they need, and implementing that. It means investing heavily in selecting true best-of-breed apps for a coherent user experience - no more shipping two desktops, 20 servers, and a gigabyte of development libraries. It could be installers that run from Windows. It could be tools that take the user's profile data from their Windows install, for use on the LiveCD. It could be fixing all our software to use NetworkManager, and partnering even more with Fluendo for codec deployment. It involves partnering with various organizations, including RH, to provide support, because you're not going to get mass market usage without *SOMEONE* providing backend support for it. And there's plenty more that people have suggested we should be doing. Overthrowing the music industry. Showcasing content production for graphic artists. Just running rock-solid servers. Right now we don't have any overriding set of goals. So we never really say 'no, that isn't what we want Fedora to do' to anything that fits our simple 'uses open source, isn't completely targeted to obsolete things' mantra, and we attempt to do all of these things... which means we'll probably fail at all of them. Bill _______________________________________________ fedora-advisory-board mailing list fedora-advisory-board@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-advisory-board
