Rahul Sundaram wrote:
"The Fedora Project is a collection of projects sponsored by Red Hat,
and developed as a partnership between the open source community and Red
Hat engineers. The goal of Fedora? The rapid progress of free and open
source software and content. Public forums. Open processes. Rapid
innovation. Meritocracy and transparency. All in pursuit of the best
operating system and platform that free software (link to
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/essays/free-sw.html) can provide."
"Fedora is Linux based operating system and platform that showcases the
the best combination of robust and latest free and open source software.
Fedora is always free for anyone to use, modify, and distribute. It is
built by people across the globe who work together as a community: the
Fedora Project. The Fedora Project is open and anyone is welcome to join.
"The Fedora Project leads the advancement of free and open source
software. By using Fedora, the best of software created by the Linux and
Free software community is in your hands."
The first paragraph is too long and too fluffy.
The top two things people are going to want to do from this page are
(well by my guess, which may be wrong, but):
1) Download Fedora.
2) Figure out what Fedora is, because they have no clue.
#1 people won't even read the text.
The #2 people are newbies and need things explained simply and
concisely. We don't want to scare off the #2 people because they are
potential users and contributors. For them, I think it's best to leave
the extended 'what is the Fedora community' discussion for behind the
'Learn More' link. We hint enough about it in the two paragraphs that
are on the site right now. Hopefully that bit is enticing enough that
they'll want to learn more.
I explain what Linux and Fedora are to my seatmates on planes all the
time, and I think if I started spewing off that first suggested
paragraph their eyes would glaze over and they'd put their headsets on,
not really understanding *what* I was talking about. Instead I start
with paragraphs #2 and #3 (an operating system is something solid,
something they use everyday. I have to make many comparisons to Windows
and Mac OS X before they 'get' it. An open community is not something
unfortunately that everybody is a member of and understands so it's
difficult to draw understandable parallels.), get them interested enough
to download, and if it doesn't seem like I'll make much progress
explaining the other stuff I let it be.
Anyway, that is my rationale for the text that is there already. It's
never good to have a deluge of text on the front page anyway (it should
be an 'elevator pitch,' not a detailed lecture) and I think your
suggestion just makes it too long. Warren and I sat down for a couple
hours (at least) and brainstormed up with what is there, carefully
considering all of the above. It's probably not perfect and I don't
doubt it could use a reworking or improvements, but I don't think a good
solution is to just tack on more stuff, rather to define what message is
the most important to convey and defer the other stuff to a link under it.
Just so you know that that text, in particular, was not just filler that
I pulled out of a hat. :)
~m
