Liner notes

[Brendan Jones]

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

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

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(a)gmail.com&gt; 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(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>  https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/music 


-- 
Twitter: http://twitter.com/znmeb; Computational Journalism on a Stick
http://j.mp/CompJournoStickOverview

My poltergeist can beat up your zeitgeist.

[Christopher Antila]

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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
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[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

On Sun, Jan 26, 2014 at 11:39 AM, Christopher Antila
<crantila(a)fedoraproject.org&gt; 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. ;-)

[Ian Malone]

On 26 January 2014 21:11, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <znmeb(a)znmeb.net&gt; wrote:
>  On Sun, Jan 26, 2014 at 11:39 AM, Christopher Antila
>  <crantila(a)fedoraproject.org&gt; 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:
>  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 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.


-- 
imalone
http://ibmalone.blogspot.co.uk

[Ian Malone]

On 26 January 2014 11:07, Brendan Jones <brendan.jones.it(a)gmail.com&gt; 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.

-- 
imalone
http://ibmalone.blogspot.co.uk

[Ian Malone]

On 26 January 2014 19:39, Christopher Antila <crantila(a)fedoraproject.org&gt; 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.

-- 
imalone
http://ibmalone.blogspot.co.uk

[Fernando Lopez-Lezcano]

On 01/26/2014 01:11 PM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
>  On Sun, Jan 26, 2014 at 11:39 AM, Christopher Antila
>  <crantila(a)fedoraproject.org&gt; 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

[Brian Monroe]

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(a)gmail.com&gt;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(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>  https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/music

[Christopher Antila]

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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(a)fedoraproject.org&gt; 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. ;-)
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