Draft Product Description for Fedora Workstation

[Colin Walters]

On Tue, 2013-11-05 at 13:23 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
>  If
> distros move away from the gospel of centralized distribution 

Some people working on technologies in this area may have that as a
goal, but I think it's absolutely crucial to continue to support the
"package" model of application distribution as well.

Consider applications like Boxes or virt-manager - these are tightly
tied into the virtualization libraries which are in turn tightly tied
into the operating system plumbing - and that's fine and makes sense!

The two other cases are:
- Less tightly coupled Free Software 
- Proprietary software

This is a fantastically complex discussion for a number of reasons just
with respect to terminology - for example, Debian has a non-free
repository that is "centralized", or at least more centralized than
Fedora.

I know you had a long mail, but your example didn't state whether 
"Shiny New Application" was Free Software or proprietary, or whether it
was tightly coupled or not, etc.  These aspects matter, and there's a
lot of grey area in the continuum.

But I guess a bottom line is as a member of the upstream GNOME
community, I would argue very much against any application mechanism
which did not allow applications to *also* be shipped in the traditional
package model.