On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 08:43:52PM -0800, Adam Williamson wrote: > So...I'm feeling like we have this slightly surreal experience that, > just as people are starting to feel good about Fedora and we're putting > out solid products that are well received, we're implementing a whole > bunch of radical plans to 'fix the problem' that already appears to be > being fixed, the old-fashioned way, by just *building good software and > telling people about it*. > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics appears to have stopped being > updated in the middle of last year, but I'd sure be interested to see > the F20 numbers. I wish we had better metrics in general -- even when those are updated, they're not the best measures. I agree based on subjective feedback that F20 is very well recieved, although perhaps in a quiet, slow-and-steady way rather than making a splash. (And that's fine.) I know, though, that we are not as relevant as we could be in cloud computing (which, despite the hype, is a real thing vital to our future; I can give that pitch separately). Where we do have numbers, they are sad. And I know anecdotally from my former academic sysadmin life that we have a big under-served audience for some server uses of Fedora. Finally, also from that experience, I know it's important to be relevant and exciting to high school and college students -- that's Fedora's future. I know some people believe that a works-like-a-mac experience is necessary for bringing in the developer and modern admin/ops audience that is driving the cloud computing boom; I'm going to bracket that as a "maybe...", but otherwise, this particular initiative isn't very relevant for the first two of those areas. That leaves the student / new excitement and growth audience. Here, "Ubuntu plays my mp3s!" and "it just works" is certainly something we hear, but I also know that our strong free software stance is appealing as well. (Other people have already made that point more articulately than I can, but I'll just add that it's a reason I've stayed with Fedora over the years.) Overall, I'm unconvinced that focusing on enabling proprietary software would be a net win _in the desktop area alone_, and I think that depending on the implementation there's a serious risk of a net loss to the project as a whole. (And to be clear, I'm speaking with concern for Fedora overall, not with my Cloud SIG hat on.) So, what was my point here? I didn't really mean to write a long message (but am too lazy to write a short one), but I wanted to respond to the "why are we messing with things?" question. Fedora *is* doing well and is in a good place, but we can do better and there are areas that we do need some changes in order to grow into and better support. I don't see _this_ as very important to that. -- Matthew Miller -- Fedora Project -- <mattdm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> _______________________________________________ advisory-board mailing list advisory-board@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/advisory-board
