A friend of mine, awesome music producer (https://soundcloud.com/omegachildproductions) had a hardware failure and decided to try Linux.
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.
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.
Anyway B
Join forces with CCRMA *and* start a remix *and* find a revenue model. ;-) You simply can't do audio without *some* non-free RPM Fusion-ish packages, and that means finding paying customers.
I'm in the same boat with my computational journalism remix, even though I'm sticking with 100% Fedora-compatible licenses. I find myself recommending OSGeo-Live for the journos with heavy mapping needs, and I find myself recommending Whonix or Tails for security even though most of the components of those distros are already packaged in Fedora and in my remix. Packaging is both labor-intensive and capital-intensive, so I just ship scripts to grab stuff off the web. ;-)
For Jam, I'd keep it up through F21 but focus on re-factoring the kickstart file into yum groups and getting as many Planet CCRMA packages as possible into Fedora. I wouldn't do "hard stuff" like packaging without a revenue model.
BTW, I may have noted this before but I'm really convinced that the JavaScript WebAudio API and Mozilla's asm.js are where the future of algorithmic composition / digital synthesis are.
On Sun, Jan 26, 2014 at 3:07 AM, Brendan Jones brendan.jones.it@gmail.com wrote:
A friend of mine, awesome music producer (https://soundcloud.com/omegachildproductions) had a hardware failure and decided to try Linux.
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.
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.
Anyway B _______________________________________________ music mailing list music@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/music
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512
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
On Sun, Jan 26, 2014 at 11:39 AM, Christopher Antila crantila@fedoraproject.org wrote:
[snip]
Problem 1: with a "Spin," we can't accomplish everything we wanted (e.g., no realtime kernel, no MP3 support).
Is the real-time kernel still an issue? Sure, in the days of slow machines, 32-bit x86 and low-end sound cards it might have been a problem, but really - with a 2 GHz 64-bit chip and audio cards that do the heavy lifting, is the real-time kernel still needed?
MP3 - the other distros get around that by paying money to other businesses. Google and Mozilla are slowly but surely hacking away at the need for MP3. We'll get there, maybe even in my lifetime. Firefox OS doesn't support FLAC, for example. ;-)
Problem 2: we didn't get the additional contributors we hoped for.
Packaging is labor-intensive and capital-intensive. That's why I don't do it.
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.
Well, I have two hobbies - algorithmic composition / digital sound synthesis and data / computational journalism. So no single spin covers both and my machine is basically Fedora Design Suite plus R and R Studio plus the packages from the Jam spin.
Problem 4: we don't have enough contributors to do what we want---or we want to do more than we can.
Nobody has enough 'contributors', where 'contributors' == 'people who work for love instead of money' ;-)
Problem 5: pulling ourselves into the Fedora community necessarily means we restrict what we can do, both technically and legally.
I don't think that's really a problem - I'd rather have Fedora's restrictions than Ubuntu's chaos and all the other distros' lack of already-packaged audio solutions.
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.
I'd still like to see a yum package group/groups salvaged from the kickstart file.
[snip]
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.
If we 'leave Fedora' there are essentially two options: 1. We join the throng of 'labor of love / no product-market fit' audio distros based on Debian or Ubuntu, competing for scarce resources with them, or 2. We migrate to openSUSE, where there's a huge infrastructure in the OpenSUSE Build Service and SUSE Studio, and try to find a paying market.
I'm seriously considering moving my CompJournoStick Fedora Remix back to SUSE Studio where it was 'born'; the appliance creation / distribution process there is a few years ahead of building ISOs on my workstation and I don't have the business model to go to Red Hat and say, "you should invest in computational journalism". I guess they'll figure that out on their own if I stay on Fedora. ;-)
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?
The good news is that F21 is going to have a long release cycle - at this point it looks like August and I'm guessing some big upstream must-haves will slip it a bit. So if we stay with Fedora, we "just need to marshall resources". ;-)
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?
I don't see a point in another repository. Planet CCRMA and RPM Fusion have just about everything the Debian/Ubuntu repos have. If we're going to make a remix, I'd seriously consider moving to openSUSE - the licensing / branding stuff is pretty much the same as Fedora's but the SUSE-supported packaging and media creation infrastructure on the web is much better. And their KDE kicks major butt.
If we stay, how can we encourage the rest of the community to accept our admittedly-disruptive desires?
I don't know that they're all that disruptive. We have the same wishes all open-source projects have - robust, low-cost software without a bunch of lawyers getting between us and our users. ;-)
On 26 January 2014 21:11, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky znmeb@znmeb.net wrote:
On Sun, Jan 26, 2014 at 11:39 AM, Christopher Antila crantila@fedoraproject.org wrote:
[snip]
Problem 1: with a "Spin," we can't accomplish everything we wanted (e.g., no realtime kernel, no MP3 support).
Is the real-time kernel still an issue? Sure, in the days of slow machines, 32-bit x86 and low-end sound cards it might have been a problem, but really - with a 2 GHz 64-bit chip and audio cards that do the heavy lifting, is the real-time kernel still needed?
Not much, though one thing needed for real time, group setup, isn't possible through a spin. Not sure what the situation is about the priority settings, think that's been sorted.
MP3 - the other distros get around that by paying money to other businesses. Google and Mozilla are slowly but surely hacking away at the need for MP3. We'll get there, maybe even in my lifetime. Firefox OS doesn't support FLAC, for example. ;-)
This is a problem, mp3 might be on the way out (and the patents should expire fairly soon anyway), but it's already been replaced by things like AAC which will take longer to die. Opus is fairly hopeful since lots of big players have supported it. A way for people to buy into or sign up for plugins they need that aren't included would be great, but that's already been tried with the fluendo stuff.
Problem 2: we didn't get the additional contributors we hoped for.
Packaging is labor-intensive and capital-intensive. That's why I don't do it.
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.
Well, I have two hobbies - algorithmic composition / digital sound synthesis and data / computational journalism. So no single spin covers both and my machine is basically Fedora Design Suite plus R and R Studio plus the packages from the Jam spin.
I'm using the spin! On two computers! Though if it went away I'd install the KDE spin and add packages. That's probably not enough users to count as 'accomplished social goals'.
Problem 4: we don't have enough contributors to do what we want---or we want to do more than we can.
Nobody has enough 'contributors', where 'contributors' == 'people who work for love instead of money' ;-)
Problem 5: pulling ourselves into the Fedora community necessarily means we restrict what we can do, both technically and legally.
I don't think that's really a problem - I'd rather have Fedora's restrictions than Ubuntu's chaos and all the other distros' lack of already-packaged audio solutions.
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.
I'd still like to see a yum package group/groups salvaged from the kickstart file.
What are the technical goals? Might help to have what people's aims are. The yum package group might actually be a good thing, it'd be available to more fedora users and is pretty much all that can be accomplished through a spin anyway. Technically the thing I care about most is having pulse and jack work smoothly together, that and having a mixer that works. There are other things, DAW, light audio players and editors (dragon is quite nice, audacity is pretty handy), some synths and drums for messing with. (Oh, and if I could figure out why having a rocksmith cable plugged in causes xruns though Jack's not using it. Money so far is on USB oddness.) I recently acquired a raspberry pi. I'm wondering if it's capable of running guitarix (probably not, but yet to try).
[snip]
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.
If we 'leave Fedora' there are essentially two options:
- We join the throng of 'labor of love / no product-market fit' audio
distros based on Debian or Ubuntu, competing for scarce resources with them, or 2. We migrate to openSUSE, where there's a huge infrastructure in the OpenSUSE Build Service and SUSE Studio, and try to find a paying market.
I basically use Fedora because I'm much happier with the way it's engineered than Ubuntu. Maybe we need to speak to the RPMfusion people? Not being able to point people to resources that cause problems for Fedora is quite a handicap, though quite a lot of us are based outside the madness of the US patent system. I think what we're missing is somewhere that the community can provide instructions and tutorials that isn't dependent on Fedora infrastructure so Fedora can be clear of responsibility. Fedora + RPMfusion + CCRMA is actually great.
On 26 January 2014 11:07, Brendan Jones brendan.jones.it@gmail.com wrote:
A friend of mine, awesome music producer (https://soundcloud.com/omegachildproductions) had a hardware failure and decided to try Linux.
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.
Can I ask why kxstudio? As in: I don't know much about it, is there anything that can be learnt?
I'm probably the polar opposite to Ed, algorithmic composition really isn't my thing, I'm someone who knows quite a lot about computers and messes about with guitars that are often attached to computers. In that world people are keen on things like pro-tools and cubase (reaper is gaining some popularity as a budget option). Garageband has been very successful for Mac, all these things do very smooth integration (I've played about with ableton as a free copy came with my amp, similar, recording and sequencing is in one package). On the other hand, Qtractor if you don't know what you're doing it takes a while to get a piano roll playing.
I wonder if there's some way to: 1. Spoof integrated tutorials. It'd be a lot of work for upstreams to build them in, but not sure if there's desktop programming or playback that can be done. 2. One click setup for some kind of basic workflow. E.g. get jack started, launch ardour or qtractor or whatever with minimal extra work to start a project.
On 26 January 2014 19:39, Christopher Antila crantila@fedoraproject.org wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512
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.
On 01/26/2014 01:11 PM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
On Sun, Jan 26, 2014 at 11:39 AM, Christopher Antila crantila@fedoraproject.org wrote:
[snip]
Problem 1: with a "Spin," we can't accomplish everything we wanted (e.g., no realtime kernel, no MP3 support).
Is the real-time kernel still an issue? Sure, in the days of slow machines, 32-bit x86 and low-end sound cards it might have been a problem, but really - with a 2 GHz 64-bit chip and audio cards that do the heavy lifting, is the real-time kernel still needed?
The answer would be, well, it depends.
Every new Fedora release comes with a new kernel. So far every time I test a new one I rapidly find it does not work well enough for my needs. Xruns happen too frequently. My needs are all Jack based, 48KHz, 128 x 2 latency (at least), both onboard sound and ExpressCard based RME cards (at home), M66 and RME cards at work. Usually heavily loaded systems for realtime performance and processing, no xruns please :-)
-- Fernando
You could also point him towards Open Octave http://www.openoctave.org/oomidi_2011 it's close to what Logic provides.
Sadly, it's close source as it uses linuxsampler as the backend.
On Sun, Jan 26, 2014 at 3:07 AM, Brendan Jones brendan.jones.it@gmail.comwrote:
A friend of mine, awesome music producer (https://soundcloud.com/ omegachildproductions) had a hardware failure and decided to try Linux.
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.
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.
Anyway B _______________________________________________ music mailing list music@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/music
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512
There have been a bunch of scattered responses---good for discussion, bad for knowing exactly what to respond to!
My thoughts now...
- - Turns out there are some people using Fedora Jam. Maybe we're not doing as badly as we thought! But even they want a package group, which makes perfect sense. Does anybody know how to get one of these? If not, I can do some research about that.
- - Interesting how my previous comments were interpreted. I didn't actually mean we should abandon Fedora as the base for our work, and I also didn't mean we should abandon the Fedora community (even though, you know, that is what I wrote). So the rest of my points are a revised version of what I was thinking.
- - If we use the openSUSE Build Service, we can build packages for any Linux distribution. We can also branch packages from existing version on the OBS, or volunteer to share maintenance with contributors to other distributions.
- - The OBS lets us set our own packaging guidelines, and it's much easier to become a packager---if this is our primary concern at the moment, then this may be a solution. It also means we can decide to ship things that violate Fedora's licensing guidelines, and that we could ship "content" (like sample sets) too.
- - If we make a remix that basically consists of Fedora + OBS_repo, that seems pretty easy. If we don't want to bother with the remix, then we won't.
BUT.
I wonder if I'm just getting cabin fever. I'd like to know what Brendan thinks, because he's the one who currently does the most work.
Maybe we should all just shut up and try to pick up five of the packages he maintains.
Christopher
On 26 January 2014 13:11:47 you wrote:
On Sun, Jan 26, 2014 at 11:39 AM, Christopher Antila crantila@fedoraproject.org wrote:
[snip]
Problem 1: with a "Spin," we can't accomplish everything we wanted (e.g., no realtime kernel, no MP3 support).
Is the real-time kernel still an issue? Sure, in the days of slow machines, 32-bit x86 and low-end sound cards it might have been a problem, but really - with a 2 GHz 64-bit chip and audio cards that do the heavy lifting, is the real-time kernel still needed?
MP3 - the other distros get around that by paying money to other businesses. Google and Mozilla are slowly but surely hacking away at the need for MP3. We'll get there, maybe even in my lifetime. Firefox OS doesn't support FLAC, for example. ;-)
Problem 2: we didn't get the additional contributors we hoped for.
Packaging is labor-intensive and capital-intensive. That's why I don't do it.
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.
Well, I have two hobbies - algorithmic composition / digital sound synthesis and data / computational journalism. So no single spin covers both and my machine is basically Fedora Design Suite plus R and R Studio plus the packages from the Jam spin.
Problem 4: we don't have enough contributors to do what we want---or we want to do more than we can.
Nobody has enough 'contributors', where 'contributors' == 'people who work for love instead of money' ;-)
Problem 5: pulling ourselves into the Fedora community necessarily means we restrict what we can do, both technically and legally.
I don't think that's really a problem - I'd rather have Fedora's restrictions than Ubuntu's chaos and all the other distros' lack of already-packaged audio solutions.
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.
I'd still like to see a yum package group/groups salvaged from the kickstart file.
[snip]
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.
If we 'leave Fedora' there are essentially two options:
- We join the throng of 'labor of love / no product-market fit' audio
distros based on Debian or Ubuntu, competing for scarce resources with them, or 2. We migrate to openSUSE, where there's a huge infrastructure in the OpenSUSE Build Service and SUSE Studio, and try to find a paying market.
I'm seriously considering moving my CompJournoStick Fedora Remix back to SUSE Studio where it was 'born'; the appliance creation / distribution process there is a few years ahead of building ISOs on my workstation and I don't have the business model to go to Red Hat and say, "you should invest in computational journalism". I guess they'll figure that out on their own if I stay on Fedora. ;-)
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?
The good news is that F21 is going to have a long release cycle - at this point it looks like August and I'm guessing some big upstream must-haves will slip it a bit. So if we stay with Fedora, we "just need to marshall resources". ;-)
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?
I don't see a point in another repository. Planet CCRMA and RPM Fusion have just about everything the Debian/Ubuntu repos have. If we're going to make a remix, I'd seriously consider moving to openSUSE - the licensing / branding stuff is pretty much the same as Fedora's but the SUSE-supported packaging and media creation infrastructure on the web is much better. And their KDE kicks major butt.
If we stay, how can we encourage the rest of the community to accept our admittedly-disruptive desires?
I don't know that they're all that disruptive. We have the same wishes all open-source projects have - robust, low-cost software without a bunch of lawyers getting between us and our users. ;-)
-
Brendan Jones -
Brian Monroe -
Christopher Antila -
Fernando Lopez-Lezcano -
Ian Malone -
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky