Hey John, On Wed, Feb 10, 2010 at 1:09 PM, John Poelstra <poelstra@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > William Jon McCann said the following on 02/10/2010 >> >> We should try not to be haters because Ubuntu is doing so well. They >> are really focusing as a project - that is commendable. And something >> that so far Fedora has failed to do - actually *refused* to do. >> >> We should also probably consider debranding Fedora hosted so it isn't >> as distasteful to people looking for a sourceforge alternative. >> >> This is all well within reach folks. Just have to make the right choices. >> :) >> > > Well put! > > Any idea on how do we help Fedora to *make some choices* and focus? > > It seems to me that is where we are most stuck. > > It seems that people are either critical of "choices being made for them" or > too afraid of wrong choices being made by others. That puts the people in > leadership in a "loose loose" situation. Yup, I know. It isn't easy. There is a simple glib answer and it is something like "it takes some guts." But then the more complete and compelling answer is unfortunately also much more complicated. We should chat sometime. Do you ever come to Westford? There are dozens of decisions made or that should be made every day as we think about what experiences we want to provide. Every day I have a list of literally dozens of things that I could use help with as we try to design the experience of using Fedora. I'd really love to be able to get help from the Project for these things. Sadly, when we ask, more often than not we get responses of the form - "that's fine if Desktop wants that but Fedora is something else." Making decisions is hard. We know this. Any decision has the potential to fail - this is true. However, failing to make decisions (out of fear) will simply guarantee failure or even worse - render you completely irrelevant. For now, the world trusts us and looks to us to lead. They expect it and it is our job. This trust is a great responsibility that none of us take lightly. But it won't last forever. It is really unfortunate that at the same time so many of us are leaders in the larger open source world - we have failed to gain the support of our own project. I think there is plenty of blame to go around - on all sides - including mine. It is a heartbreaking reality. I don't really understand what all the fuss is about, to be honest. I look around and I don't really see that many incompatible points of view. Not that many truly compelling alternative visions. Sure, lots of bickering and sniping and personality conflicts and grudges. Far too much of that. But what else, once you look past that? Do we really disagree that Fedora can and should be the best general purpose Operating System (not distro) in the world? At the heart of it I think we all agree on that. Do we need a target audience for that? Honestly, I doubt it. Does this mean we have to cater to a certain type of person? Of course not. An Operating System is one of the most easily adaptable technologies ever developed. That isn't the challenge. The real challenge we face is: can we be relevant? Can we prove that desktop Linux has legs beyond techno geeks, outside the niche, outside the server room? I'll tell you right now, the answer is no - unless we can all work together. And I think it is time we start. Jon _______________________________________________ design-team mailing list design-team@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/design-team
