On Fri, 2008-02-29 at 13:03 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
Callum Lerwick wrote:
> I'm a Software Engineer. I believe my time is best spent making
> Fedora and Open Source in general, better. A better system will sell
> itself.
Hmmm, then why are all those boxes running windows?
Is this a troll? Yeah yeah, its idealistic engineer thinking. I
considered saying "A better product will... well, it's easier to sell."
but that wouldn't have sounded as epic. :)
A better question would be whether it is to promote what you happen
to
have, or to learn what users would like to have. There are a lot of
things that could be better in a distribution simply by combining
features that are already available in upstream packages. For example,
fedora ships an LDAP server and has the capability of using one for user
authentication, but no one does - and the value of doing it isn't
obvious until you install your second box. Why couldn't these be
shipped to work together and be the default way to manage users even on
a single box?
Users want ponies, and there's no lack of them coming on fedora-devel to
tell us so. My point here is I see no lack of communication between
Fedora developers and users. There's this and other mailing lists, IRC,
and forums such as
fedoraforum.org, all of which are frequented by at
least some developers and/or ambassadors. Ambassadors are in direct
contact with user communities. Many developers are in direct contact
with users. They have day jobs as IT people at universities, or research
institutions... Red Hat of course has its customers. And developers are
users too.
I see no problem that needs to be fixed. (Yes, more engineer thinking.)
Why give our users a hollow, meaningless vote? We'd be lying to them.
What are we, a United States presidential election? :)