On Wed, 2010-02-03 at 20:51 -0600, Mike McGrath wrote: > On Wed, 3 Feb 2010, inode0 wrote: > > > On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 8:28 PM, Mike McGrath <mmcgrath@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > On Wed, 3 Feb 2010, Mike McGrath wrote: > > >> > > >> I really don't know what our users are a measure of. I don't think it's > > >> marketing as inode0 suggests, because the people using Fedora already know > > >> about it. But if we step back and take our users seriously. We'll find > > >> that since Fedora Core 6 released in 2006-10-24 to today, we've > > >> experienced a net growth of negative 3%. Yup, a 3% loss of users. > > >> > > >> Our own users are moving _AWAY_ from Fedora. For whatever reason more > > >> users have chosen to not use Fedora then who have chosen to use Fedora. > > >> I suspect many have moved downsteam to Enterprise Linux. Which is ok > > >> but it's an indication that people came, tried Fedora, and moved on. > > >> > > > > > > Along with the above... If we're going to be the best at something don't > > > we need to pick something to be the best at? > > > > > > http://www.linux.com/learn/docs/ldp/282996-choosing-the-best-linux-distributions-for-you > > > > > > I particularly like this: > > > > > > "Ubuntu edges out its closest contenders, Fedora and openSUSE, because its > > > development team is constantly focused on the end-user experience." > > > > > > What is it we're focused on? Do I need to just ask everyone individually > > > and hope we all say the same thing? > > > > Sadly they don't have categories like the best linux distribution for > > developers there. > > > > Is that what we're doing? If so would we win it? (Apologies for diving into this thread, this got me thinking) "best linux distribution for developer" seems too vague to me to be achievable. I think there are different categories of developer. Here's an attempt at a concrete and realistic (though fictitious) persona: - Gillian is one of 6 employees at "stelthix.com", a startup based in Cambridge MA. She is a graduate of MIT. - The startup is in in "stealth" mode, building a web-based service that will be the next Google, or at least, they hope, acquired by Google (they're not yet saying what the service does). - They hope to launch the site in 3 months time; they are working every waking hour building the site and the backend, talking to investors, signing up service providers etc - All of the employees do at least some "development", even if it's just editing HTML templates, and tweaking of Python scripts. - Their web site is implemented in Django, and they're heavily using Python throughout the backend, though they have some optimized C code which one of the other developers wrote for a compute-intensive task. - They have an internal Trac instance which they're using as a private wiki, an issue tracker, and for SVN. The SVN instance stores all of their code (for both the web site, the scraping/data mining tool that feeds the data, their custom scripts that leverage Google's APIs etc). - They're happy to use FLOSS, but their code is going to be proprietary (alas). They have written an API which customers of the site can use for some purposes, but those customers will never see the implementation. - They are renting time on Amazon EC2 for the compute-heavy parts of the backend, and the beta instance of the site is hosted on Linux. - They have a buildbot that is running the full test suite after every check-in; this is running on a Linux box somewhere. - Most of the team use Mac laptops running OS X (alas), but the deployment environment is Linux, and some of the team have Linux boxes which they use for development as well. - They try to stick to the standard Python libraries plus Django because it's fiddly tracking additional dependencies in their (mixture of Mac + Linux) world. I think this is a realistic story [1], and is more concrete than "best linux distribution for developers". It leads to these questions: why will Gillian choose to use Fedora on her laptop? Why will Gillian choose to use Fedora on the backend servers? Why will Gillian recommend Fedora to the new hire after the company gets more VC funding? I'm somewhat biased towards Python here; you could rewrite this somewhat and change Python and Django to Ruby and Rails, and it's probably important to do both cases well; we want a great Rails story as well as a great Python story - "Ray was in the same class as Gillian, and now works at wearemorepragmaticthanyou.com", perhaps. Another developer persona might be: - Fred is a sysadmin and postdoc at example.ac.uk - he manages a variety of servers and workstations on the campus as a job, whilst working towards finishing his thesis - in his spare time he is working directly on a re-implementation of an encumbered piece of software - He cares deeply about software freedom, and needs a decent build of the tools he needs (gcc, GNU make, gdb, perl). - He worries about software patents, and has tried to avoid MP3 for some years, but doesn't always succeed. I hope this is useful and realistic, and not too much of a caricature. I believe we currently do a good job of appealing to Fred (though we could always do better), but less so at appealing to Gillian or Ray. This hits the "web 2.0 startup" cases and the "enthusiastic FLOSS volunteer" case; there'd probably need to be a persona for a Java developer within a large company too, and probably stuff I've not thought of. Hope this is helpful Dave [1] though the last time I worked at a company of that size was some years ago; caveat lector -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
