On Sun, 2010-05-09 at 22:11 +0200, Thomas Janssen wrote:
On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 7:34 PM, Gilboa Davara
<gilboad(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> If we, as a -community- project, want to remain relevant, it is time to
> decide who we are and what is our goal.
Agreed. The who we are is easy answered, we're RHs *playground*. That
is what everyone, not completely new to Linux, knows and one problem
why we're at 1.3% as mentioned above. Something that other distros
don't have to suffer from. And we're gladly acting like it, e.g.
x-server not compatible with HW vendor drivers at release time
(believe it or not, but users were angry about it). Bleeding edge
stuff like PA as first, ready or not for the masses.
One of the most frequented link in #fedora was/is
http://fedorasolved.org/Members/fenris02/pulseaudio-fixes-and-workarounds
Just two examples.
No wonder we're at about 1.3% eh ;)
I don't agree with that, entirely. Think about it - Red Hat sells big
enterprise stuff. Mostly servers. Directly, PA and bleeding edge X stuff
isn't of huge immediate interest to RH. I mean, of course RH is going to
pay people to work on stuff it thinks will ultimately benefit it, but it
does take a rather broad and long view of this (think how long it's
taken for PA to even be in RHEL at all). But we are a _general_
'playground' (or rather sandbox), for the development of interesting and
useful bits of technology. I think you can look at Fedora almost as a
concept car; we're developing technologies that will be useful in the
consumer car of the future, but we're _not_ that car, in a practical
sense. We have all the rough edges and bits that won't be practical in
the end.
As Kevin says in his reply, I think doing stuff like the above - PA, X
devleopment - is a strength of Fedora. It's one of the things we do
well, and for which we're valuable. But it doesn't necessarily make for
the best end-user general purpose operating system for the present
moment in time; we're blazing a trail ahead.
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net