On 26 January 2014 19:39, Christopher Antila crantila@fedoraproject.org wrote:
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Greetings to the list!
I've been thinking about this "what to do with the Jam Spin" since Brendan first raised the question last week. Guess it's time to respond.
On 26 January 2014 12:07:47 Brendan Jones wrote:
A friend of mine, awesome music producer (https://soundcloud.com/omegachildproductions) had a hardware failure and decided to try Linux.
Yay!
He is very much in the Mac world. Logic is is usual modus operandi. I found myself recommending kxstudio. A bit sad really considering we are maintaining the Jam spin.
Right, I would do the same thing. Fedora is somehow unappealing to Linux beginners.
How can we make this better? I would have loved to recommend the jam spin. I'm starting to think perhaps I should take this outside of Fedora, or maybe join forces with CCRMA, and/or start a remix. I love the ideals of Fedora though.
We're admitting we have problems, so that's the first step. I suggest we ask ourselves what our problems are, then decide how to solve them. Because this is my email, I'll start.
Problem 1: with a "Spin," we can't accomplish everything we wanted (e.g., no realtime kernel, no MP3 support).
Problem 2: we didn't get the additional contributors we hoped for.
Problem 3: even the contributors don't use or recommend the Spin. I installed the F19 spin, but I wouldn't do it again, because it's just not what I want, in the same way the Desktop Spin and the KDE Spin aren't what I want.
Problem 4: we don't have enough contributors to do what we want---or we want to do more than we can.
Problem 5: pulling ourselves into the Fedora community necessarily means we restrict what we can do, both technically and legally.
I'll propose some solutions too. Because the spin didn't and can't accomplish our technical goals, because it hasn't accomplished our social goals, because we don't seem to be using our own work, and because it's causing additional effort when we can't afford it, let's drop the spin. That's an easy first step. This was still a useful adventure for us. Though we mostly learned about what's not helpful, that's really important, and Brendan's experience in spin- building will probably be one of the keys to our ability to do whatever comes next.
But what comes next? (Or: what comes .next?) We may need to leave Fedora.
Like Brendan, and probably many of you, I really appreciate the Fedora community's published values. However, through my time here, I've begun to realize that Fedora is the upstream for RHEL, the Fedora community is for
(aside: more the testing ground!)
innovating in the cloud, and if something isn't going to make money for Red Hat, there usually isn't enough initiative to make it happen (or: these initiatives get clobbered by the contributors who have more time because they're paid by Red Hat).
Let me clarify that I honestly believe everybody is acting in good faith, and that Red Hat's influence is overall a positive thing for the Fedora community and Linux in general. This is a "tyranny of the majority" situation: what's best for accomplishing our needs and desires is different from what's best for accomplishing the needs and desires of most of the rest of the Fedora community.
Different, but maybe not in conflict. There's a lot of focus on virtualisation right now, but there are also a lot of people who don't really care, and they generally get along as it's mostly a "what people want to do gets done" situation. The spin's big problems (sfaict) are: there's little incentive for anyone to try it - existing fedora users can install packages, non-fedora users it does really have a strong selling point - and that the spin format doesn't let us make a couple of customisations that may have been useful. It may be worth dropping if it's only creating overhead without adding value for anyone.
I hope to encourage a discussion here. We need to consider how to "speak up" to get what we need. We have technical goals and community-building goals that aren't currently being met.
This, particularly the community building bit (which is really at the core of it, more people means more buzz, more interest for the people already here, more knowledge and maybe even a few people who want to contribute stuff), got me thinking. Maybe we are in the wrong place, location-wise. This, like many of the Fedora groups, is email based, the other major channel is IRC. Both of those are quite developer-esque methods of communication. The online music communities I know on the other hand are forum based (or maybe platform-centric, youtube, soundcloud etc., but I don't really take part in that). I've not had much to do with fedoraforum, they're not officially fedora, but have some infrastructure for guides and blogs, might be a space for music there.
Stop press! There are actually people using Jam: http://forums.fedoraforum.org/archive/index.php/t-294940.html Seems people might be keen on a groupinstall.