Board efforts: scope, concept, and permission?

[Matthew Garrett]

On Tue, Feb 02, 2010 at 01:05:22PM -0500, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:

> I think that the Fedora Project's target audience needs to be people who
> want to work on open source operating systems.  If you want to market the
> Fedora Project, that's the audience that needs to be addressed.

I don't think this works. Treating Fedora in this way effectively means 
that the Fedora project exists in order to facilitate derivatives. This 
is clearly workable (see the relationship between Debian and Ubuntu, for 
instance), but you then go on to say:

> If you want to market a physical product, like the Fedora Desktop Spin, then
> that should be a decision made below the Board level.  Making a decision
> about the target audience of the various distributions that we have limits
> the choices of the people who want to work on open source operating systems.
> Making a target audience decision at the SIG level widens the choices as
> marketing/artistic/documentation/etc people can choose which audiences they
> want to address via which medium.

And this doesn't work. Spins don't have the freedom to customise 
packages in the way that full-scale derivatives do, which means that 
they need to work directly on Fedora. And, obviously, what it's 
appropriate to do to the Fedora package set depends on who we want 
Fedora to be for.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org