Fedora Board Strategic Working Group

[Max Spevack]

On Tue, 12 Jan 2010, Mike McGrath wrote:

> The funny thing here is I think spins are a detriment to Fedora.  We 
> pretend they're useful and interesting but they're really not.  If we 
> describe them as "a subset of what is in the Everything/ directory" 
> which is what they are, they're not at all compelling.

If spins are *only* a subset of stuff in Everything/ that can still 
compose a funtioning OS, then yeah, they aren't really that compelling, 
since it's basically just a customized package manifest.  You could get 
to the same result with two yum commands.

The question is whether or not we've seen any innovations come into 
existence as a result of different spins -- which allow people to have 
smaller set of focus that are still useful for them -- or whether or not 
having a Fedora $FOO spin has been useful from a Marketing point of 
view.

Chitlesh has had a lot of success with the Fedora Electronics Lab spin 
that would probably not have otherwise happened.

The KDE SIG and the KDE Spin has, over the past few years, also been 
very successful.

I have always thought that a "Fedora Crazy Experimental" spin -- which 
allows folks who want to try to build an OS without a firewall, or with 
some crazy-different version of a critical package -- and came with tons 
of warning lights and a marketing drive that associated it with the 
truly bleeding-edge, playing-with-a-revoluntionary-idea kinds of people 
could lead to some interesting proof of concepts, or could be used as a 
way to make a hypothetical and flame-ridden argument on 
fedora-devel-list into something that is tangible and can be evaluated 
for real, is a valuable sort of thing.

I'd like to ask Christoph Wickert whether the existence of the Spins 
idea -- even if it's just an acknowledged friendliness in Fedora to Lots 
Of New Ideas -- helped to make the LXDE work that has been happening a 
reality, or if they would have gotten to the same place in the same 
amount of time without Spins.

But changing 10 packages from the Desktop spin to something else and 
giving that Spin a new name -- that isn't particularly valuable.

--Max