On Thu, 2012-03-22 at 16:12 +0200, Nikos Roussos wrote: > > Despite the fact that this is pretty wild guess, I don't think that > Fedora should only care about what's happening on the developed > countries and ignore the rest of the world. I don't think this is necessarily a developed-vs-developing thing. I did a talk on this at FSOSS 2011, suggesting that we're heading towards three physical tiers: (A) Content-consuming platforms - tablets/MIDs/smartphones. Almost all of these are taking a tablet-like form factor (counting most smartphones as 'tiny tablets'). These are great for consuming content - reading, surfing, watching, playing - but they are awful for creating content -- they don't have the horsepower, storage I/O, screen real estate, or long-use-comfortable UI devices for writing long documents, editing video, or composing multitrack sound. Most of these devices run ARM for low energy consumption, small size, and low cost, and many run some kind of a Linux system (even if Android). (B) Content-creation platforms - desktop/laptop. These devices aren't going away anytime soon, because there are a lot of people who create content or capture information -- students, bookkeepers, bloggers, video creators, developers, documentation writers, animators, graphics artists, engineers, secretaries, and so forth. A lot of the Fedora community falls into one or more of these categories, so any navel-gazing sample we take will be skewed toward this category. To be frank, Intel x86, proprietary operating systems (Windows and Mac OS/X), and proprietary apps still reign in this space. However, most creators consume a lot more than they create, so we will increasingly find that people who have devices in this category also have a device in category (A). This category is waning as many people realize that they are almost entirely content consumers and re-equip themselves with devices in category (A). (C) The Cloud - whether private cloud or public cloud, the backend lives here, and this connects the content creators to the content consumers. Space, heat, and power costs and scaling issues are driving cloud operators to look for new solutions. ARM is looking like a pretty good option but has not yet been proven in this space. Projects that have a legacy component often use proprietary software here, but the majority of new cloud projects use open source for a significant part of the stack. So of the three categories, two are on the rise, and one is on the decline. The ones on the rise are categories where ARM competes well and open source software thrives. If we want to remain relevant as a community and project, we need to adapt and move our focus to these emerging/rising categories -- hence the focus on Fedora ARM. -Chris -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
