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? 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 How many of those are due to misconceptions or outdated information, and how many of them are legitimate failings in our processes? 3) Whether it's fit for task.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@xxxxxxxxxxxxx _______________________________________________ board-discuss mailing list board-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/board-discuss
