Thank you everyone for your thoughtful feedback. Since I was on vacation last week, I didn't keep up with the thread in real time, and rather than going back and commenting on individual messages, this is a wrap-up of points I saw. Putting Free Software and Open Source in the mission statement directly. ======================================================================== The first thing that got a lot of discussion is a request to put something about free software and/or open source in the mission statement itself. I want to stress again that this wasn't omitted to pave the way for some movement away from our commitment to this. Quite to the contrary: in our discussion, the Council considered this a basic fundamental rather than something that we thought needed to be repeated in the mission. Some of the response worrying about this is my fault, I think, because this thread presented the mission and background for it mostly on its own, rather than as we are expecting to show it: in a revised version of the Fedora overview wiki pages which show the Foundations and Mission together. In the discussion, I noticed a *lot* of different terminology being thrown about: free and open source, free software and open source, open source, open, free, free software, FOSS, free/open. I'm glad that we didn't have any long vi/emacs war debates about the various political philosophies embodied, but I think we do all know that there *is* a lot behind each particular wording. Fedora has always tried to stay above that — bridging as best we can without conflict — and it's important to me that we continue to do so. And, I *definitely* don't want to use acronyms like FOSS or FLOSS — that immediately limits understanding to a very niche in-club. So, I think that if we *do* include some wording about this in the statement, it needs to be a longer form, with "free software and open source" the bare minimum. But, I also think we're plenty wordy already, so my preference really remains with making a prominent Freedom foundation as our banner for this, and leaving it as granted in the mission. It's also worth noting that we had one comment from a contributor who felt her (all open source / free software!) contributions were attacked because of association with a proprietary software company, and that having this in the mission would further embolden that behavior. I certainly hope that wouldn't be true (following our commitment to Friends, after all), but I can see the concern. Also, there was a commenter who felt that not having free software in the statement meant that we would reduce our focus on upstream first — our relationships with the rest of the open source world and, basically, our software supply chain. Again, I think this is actually best addressed by the Foundations — specifically, the Features foundation talks about this directly. In any case, I remain open to inserting a "free software and open source" clause if it's the community consensus that we *need* to — but I personally hope that we can see it as deep in our DNA already, and showcase it through the Foundations. "Lights up" ========== People reacted strongly to this. I'm not surprised — but, personally, I still kinda like it. Sure, it's jargon, but I don't think the metaphor is hard to understand. And, I didn't hear an alternative better than "enables", which feels particularly weak to me. This isn't the hill I plan to die on, though, if everyone hates it. I'd still love to hear something more interesting than "enables". Ordering of the statement, and particularly, distance from users ================================================================ There was some discussion on reordering the statement to change the emphasis. This relates, I think, to discussion here and also on LWN.net with concern that there's no focus on desktop/laptop users specifically. Some of the commentary seemed to assume that this was accidental and sent a message other than intended. No, actually, we put it this way on purpose. But, it shouldn't be scary. As I said in the intro message, the Council built this draft from a discussion of Fedora strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities. And, while we have an awesome user and community, catering to that community directly has never really been our strong point at the core of our project. That's why we decided that we wanted the focus on building the Fedora platform *for* developers and for our own contributor community, and to help that community to engage users with user- and use-case focused solutions. This *doesn't* mean that we're abandoning the desktop, or anything else. As I said on LWN, the mission statement is *not* an end-user marketing message. It's meant to help guide the project itself (as well as potential collaborators and contributors). In fact, we don't really want to market the Fedora platform to end users at all. Instead, we want to have stronger distinct marketing around Fedora Workstation, Fedora Atomic, Fedora Server — and all the various Spins. Many of these *do* have a direct end-user focus. We've seen a marked increase in various metrics since we started this organizational and marketing split with Fedora.next, and we want to build on that. I'm not entirely opposed to the general idea of putting the "for community members and software developers to build" part *before* the "lights up" (or whatever) part — but I _don't_ want to move "users" into the platform target directly. Platform vs. Platforms / "Supports an Ecosystem" ================================================ There was some discussion about whether we build _a_ platform or multiple platforms. And, related, some of the earliest comments were about an ecosystem emphasis. I think the above section actually addresses this — a platform with an ecosystem is exactly the intent, and I really think the draft as proposed carries that well. I'd very much welcome help with additional supplemental and explanatory material, though. So, next? ========= Again, thank you everyone for the good discussion. As a next step, I'm going to file a Council ticket with the original draft and several of the proposed tweaks and rewrites from the thread. Let's keep non-Council-member discussion going here on this list, rather than splitting it to the ticket. -- Matthew Miller <mattdm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Fedora Project Leader _______________________________________________ council-discuss mailing list -- council-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to council-discuss-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
