Board efforts: scope, concept, and permission?

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Tue, Feb 02, 2010 at 01:54:37PM -0500, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Toshio Kuratomi (a.badger at gmail.com) said: 
> > 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.
> > 
> > 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.
> 
> I don't find this completely workable. By decreeing this sort of non-target
> for the project, and limiting Spin maintainers to only changes in the
> package set, but not the packages themselves (as we do), you're essentially 
> telling them they'll never be able to attack their target audience *well*.
> 
In my other message, I go into more detail on this.  Instead of defining
a target audience and thereby limiting some contirubtors to working on
second class products, change the other limitations that we have in place to
allow them to do the work they need.  Be an enabler, not a judge.  Figure
out ways that the packageset can be made to accomodate multiple uses rather
than saying that the packageset is only optimized for one usecase and any
contributor that wants to work on a conflicting use case needs to find a new
project to work on.

My other mail suggests that one way to work with this is to create new
conflicting packages that are optimized for the different usages.  There's
other ways as well but the general theme is that we need to be looking at
ways to open up what people can do with the raw material of the Fedora
Project to create their vision of a free software operating system rather
than closing off what Fedora can be good for and making it so that certain
visions are second class citizens that can only advance as long as they
don't conflict with a different, specific vision.

-Toshio
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/attachments/20100202/55986c56/attachment.bin