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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 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.
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. Will "Fedora.next" allow us to meet our goals, or should we try to establish ourselves independently? Which requires more effort, and how much effort do we have to work with? If we leave, should we make a remix or simply offer an additional repository and a supportive community? If we stay, how can we encourage the rest of the community to accept our admittedly-disruptive desires?
Christopher