On Thu, 2005-06-23 at 08:20 -0700, Karsten Wade wrote: > On Thu, 2005-06-23 at 08:34 +0100, Thierry Sayegh wrote: > > > As a poweruser, I would like to contribute but > > You just did. > > User advocates, documenters, marketeers, all sorts have something to > contribute that is outside of code. > > Takes all sorts to make the community go 'round. > > - Karsten Don't kill the messenger on this one. Or set me free if that's your idea. Fedora has a significant user base. It's about the same as SUSE Pro and NLD combined. It trails Ubuntu and Debian and derivatives by about 50%. Ubuntu is the only active community in the Linux world right now. The amount of documentations, innovation, side projects, users, posters is remarkable. I think they did it at Red Hat's expense. If you survey the participants, many came from Red Hat of the past. They went shopping for another distribution when Red Hat 9 disappeared. If you come out of denial, you will realize you lost your community of participants and the project is too confusing you have unwittingly constructed barriers to entry. Look at the discussion on this list. Collin comes in with this commanding presence and others argue. Also, by excluding independents, you will chase them off also and have squat. Ubuntu has very carefully planned and centralized facilities for support and a core development team plus several hundred code contributors, bug submissions and gophers. They've been in existence seven months and have the largest Linux community. Fedora could do something similar but this waffling around will not get the job done. Further, your fixed ideas and know-it -ll attitudes will kill you. You don't have all the answers, you don't even know the questions. How can anyone contribute to you? What Red Hat lost, Ubuntu gained and then some. I did a study for Sun and prior to the release of the first Ubuntu product, gave Sun a blueprint for doing a community. They laughed. But, Mark Shuttleworth implemented it and in five months they shipped 1 million CDs - and that doesn't count downloads. I personally do not believe we can catch them. But we can look at their blueprint for a community and regain significant market share at the expense of Novell and others. Open your minds. If you want statistics, I can come up with them. I did this study and regardless of what you think of me - I know more about this that you do. You know squat and you can't put a community back together with your immature approach, regardless of how much you think you know and have experienced elsewhere. Fedora may have some interested participants, but they are users not developers and not contributors. You have too much ground to make up. Don't forget, this is the result of the CEO telling aspiring Linux desktop users to go with Windows. I'd start over from scratch, do our own thing and forget the controlling interest of Red Hat. You need infrastructure and you need to court people at the LUG level. You should give away CD's, provide schools with free software including things like Openoffice, etc. If you don't want to extend yourselves, then you're going to thrash around and never get anything done - but talk.
