-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 07/23/2013 09:50 PM, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote: > Earlier this evening I was asked how I expected Fedora to function > in any way similarly to how it does now without the backing of one > or more organizations like Red Hat. > > I gave the quick answer "through donations" since I was not in > mood to give the detailed answers ( and taint that thread even > further ) however I'm about do it here to certain extent since the > questioner probably did not expect me to have actually given this > any thought which I actually have although I have not chiselled it > into stone, making it the concrete proposal the community demands > since it's just a small fraction of a larger idea or rather vision > I have but I have decide it be the correct time to share that part > of that vision of mine with the rest of the community to gather > feedback. > While I *am* pleased that you've given some real thought to this, I think you may have missed the real point I was trying to make there, which also ties back to the original purpose of that thread. Fedora is hemorrhaging users to other distributions (and to closed-source platforms). I tried to note that the people maintaining the vast majority of the pieces that correspond to an "operating system" in Fedora (loosely the Ring 0-2 pieces in that design) are almost entirely Red Hatters. This information is based on admittedly imperfect metrics (mostly dist-git commits), but even if it's off by a 15% margin of error, the contributions still have Red Hat in the vast majority. The problem with crowdsourcing is that you have to have someone who wants your product enough to pay money to see it happen. There are definitely some pieces of your proposal that could be implemented (I've been arguing for Bug/RFE bounties for the last five years, both with Red Hat funding and later with crowdfunding). I'd really like to see FESCo have the ability to set such bounties as a way to actually influence direction in the project. So on this I agree wholeheartedly. Unfortunately, the current Fedora user ecosystem *really* doesn't lend itself to crowdfunding because the only significant community of non-Red Hat contributors are those operating on the upper levels of the stack (the application developers and the alternative desktop developers, primarily). This tends to be a set of contributors that are fickle in the platform they work on (especially since in many cases, they are supporting multiple distributions already). In other words, if we switched to a crowdfunded model, the primary contributions would *still* be coming directly or indirectly from Red Hat. The only difference here is that now it would look like Red Hat was taking a stealth role in Fedora's governance instead of standing tall as its primary benefactor (and beneficiary). Also, you mention later in the thread about moving Fedora's name out of the USA. Given the current US climate around "outsourcing", this could be a significant legal hurdle and is probably not a fight worth having right at this moment. tl;dr version: If we switched to a crowdfunding model, Red Hat would still be the primary contributor and little would change. I strongly support opening up a donation program to support bug/rfe/design bounties. I'd like to see that pool of money managed by FESCo. If people want to donate to bounties for individual upstream projects, it's probably better for them to do that directly. That would probably be a better experience on both sides (and lends itself to forging a closer relationship between the two projects). -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.13 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://www.enigmail.net/ iEYEARECAAYFAlHvvA4ACgkQeiVVYja6o6Oh2gCdFwg297BRIGEbDBQ14h3ul1m6 9OQAoIk0lNDlknxdXTLWTazDqdoujsKQ =Deka -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
