Get the developers back on Fedora!

[Sudhir]

Hi All,

I was doing some comparison of Linux distro usage and I found below, 
though the comparison is for websites, it might not be very surprising 
to see the same trend across technologies other than websites.

http://w3techs.com/technologies/comparison/os-fedora,os-ubuntu,os-debian

There is huge difference in terms of % usage between Fedora and Debian.

If we remove the free/non-free software availability and Gnome 3 
argument, is there anything that they are doing more as a community that 
we lack? which in-turn leading developers to choose Debian/Ubuntu as 
their default working environment? While we are looking at coming up 
with goals for Fedora, it might be a good revisit to focus on getting 
the developers back on Fedora as their default developing environment. 
Just a thought.

Regards,
Sudhir

[Stephen Gallagher]

>  On Feb 4, 2015, at 7:10 AM, Sudhir <sdharane(a)fedoraproject.org&gt;
> wrote:
>  
>  Hi All,
>  
>  I was doing some comparison of Linux distro usage and I found below, though the
> comparison is for websites, it might not be very surprising to see the same trend across
> technologies other than websites.
>  
>  http://w3techs.com/technologies/comparison/os-fedora,os-ubuntu,os-debian
>  
>  There is huge difference in terms of % usage between Fedora and Debian.
>  
>  If we remove the free/non-free software availability and Gnome 3 argument, is there
> anything that they are doing more as a community that we lack? which in-turn leading
> developers to choose Debian/Ubuntu as their default working environment? While we are
> looking at coming up with goals for Fedora, it might be a good revisit to focus on getting
> the developers back on Fedora as their default developing environment. Just a thought.

This is already the primary stated goal of the Fedora Workstation. In Fedora 21, we made a
big push in this direction with the DevAssistant project, which we have been advertising
and getting excellent press coverage.

There are plenty of other developer-oriented features in the works, including Software
Collections (to address forward and backward compatibility) as well as exploration of the
use of containerized applications to simplify the differences between development and
deployment environments.

So from the outreach perspective, I think the best thing we can do is help gather
requirements for these new features and assist Marketing with advertising the ones we have
already delivered (like DevAssistant).


>  
>  Regards,
>  Sudhir
>  _______________________________________________
>  outreach mailing list
>  outreach(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>  https://lists.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/outreach

[Stephen Gallagher]

>  On Feb 4, 2015, at 7:36 AM, Stephen Gallagher
> <sgallagh(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote:
>  
>  
>  
>  
>  
> > On Feb 4, 2015, at 7:10 AM, Sudhir <sdharane(a)fedoraproject.org&gt; wrote:
> > 
> > Hi All,
> > 
> > I was doing some comparison of Linux distro usage and I found below, though the
> comparison is for websites, it might not be very surprising to see the same trend across
> technologies other than websites.
> > 
> > http://w3techs.com/technologies/comparison/os-fedora,os-ubuntu,os-debian
> >  

I sent my previous reply prior to reading that page carefully, so I suppose I should chime
in with noting that this is not representative necessarily of the developer case. This is
actually a *deployment* comparison, which is a very different thing. For a very long time,
a common sentiment has been "Fedora is not for servers". This was a statement
made repeatedly, not just by consumers of Fedora but by those who were developing it.

This has never been a fully true statement, but a very large amount of work had been
directed at Fedora's desktop usage and for a server it was largely relegated to
"good enough, but you should just use RHEL/CentOS downstream when deploying".
(It's interesting to note that they left RHEL and clones out of that comparison on
that site, which implies a certain level of bias in the reporting).

We now have revived Fedora's Server SIG to start changing this narrative and we are
building a number of new server-targeted technologies that we hope will bring more people
into using Fedora for this purpose. There's also Fedora Atomic, which promises to
become an excellent application container host and should be a very interesting deployment
strategy as well (alongside OpenShift Origin, in particular). So I am very hopeful that we
will be seeing a marked uptick in the use of Fedora on production deployments over the
next couple years.


> > There is huge difference in terms of % usage between Fedora and
> Debian.
> > 
> > If we remove the free/non-free software availability and Gnome 3 argument, is there
> anything that they are doing more as a community that we lack? which in-turn leading
> developers to choose Debian/Ubuntu as their default working environment? While we are
> looking at coming up with goals for Fedora, it might be a good revisit to focus on getting
> the developers back on Fedora as their default developing environment. Just a thought.
>  
>  
>  This is already the primary stated goal of the Fedora Workstation. In Fedora 21, we made
> a big push in this direction with the DevAssistant project, which we have been advertising
> and getting excellent press coverage.
>  
>  There are plenty of other developer-oriented features in the works, including Software
> Collections (to address forward and backward compatibility) as well as exploration of the
> use of containerized applications to simplify the differences between development and
> deployment environments.
>  
>  So from the outreach perspective, I think the best thing we can do is help gather
> requirements for these new features and assist Marketing with advertising the ones we have
> already delivered (like DevAssistant).
>  
>  
> > 
> > Regards,
> > Sudhir
> > _______________________________________________
> > outreach mailing list
> > outreach(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
> > https://lists.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/outreach
>  _______________________________________________
>  outreach mailing list
>  outreach(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>  https://lists.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/outreach

[Sudhir]

On 02/04/2015 12:19 PM, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
> > On Feb 4, 2015, at 7:36 AM, Stephen Gallagher <sgallagh(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >> On Feb 4, 2015, at 7:10 AM, Sudhir <sdharane(a)fedoraproject.org&gt; wrote:
> >>
> >> Hi All,
> >>
> >> I was doing some comparison of Linux distro usage and I found below, though the
> comparison is for websites, it might not be very surprising to see the same trend across
> technologies other than websites.
> >>
> >> http://w3techs.com/technologies/comparison/os-fedora,os-ubuntu,os-debian
> >>
>
>  I sent my previous reply prior to reading that page carefully, so I suppose I should
> chime in with noting that this is not representative necessarily of the developer case.
> This is actually a *deployment* comparison, which is a very different thing. 
This is a very interesting point. I did think about this but I also 
believe that the environment that one use for development is most likely 
the environment the one goes on to deploy.. It is understood that this 
is not true for large enterprise organizations, but mostly true for 
smaller organization which has most of the developer base that work on 
opensource technologies.

>    For a very long time, a common sentiment has been "Fedora is
> not for servers". This was a statement made repeatedly, not just by consumers of
> Fedora but by those who were developing it. 
I have heard this before :) and I concur with you that I never fully 
understood it either. Now that the software game is changing, we are 
seeing a large number of startups/smaller organization adopt opensource 
technologies and use opensource platform for obvious reasons.. we have a 
good opportunity to prove this statement completely wrong atleast for 
these users.. But we have to make Fedora lucrative for developers or 
create awareness as to why Fedora should be their choice for development.

Regards,
Sudhir
>  This has never been a fully true statement, but a very large amount
> of work had been directed at Fedora's desktop usage and for a server it was largely
> relegated to "good enough, but you should just use RHEL/CentOS downstream when
> deploying". (It's interesting to note that they left RHEL and clones out of that
> comparison on that site, which implies a certain level of bias in the reporting).
>
>  We now have revived Fedora's Server SIG to start changing this narrative and we are
> building a number of new server-targeted technologies that we hope will bring more people
> into using Fedora for this purpose. There's also Fedora Atomic, which promises to
> become an excellent application container host and should be a very interesting deployment
> strategy as well (alongside OpenShift Origin, in particular). So I am very hopeful that we
> will be seeing a marked uptick in the use of Fedora on production deployments over the
> next couple years.
>
>
> >> There is huge difference in terms of % usage between Fedora and Debian.
> >>
> >> If we remove the free/non-free software availability and Gnome 3 argument, is
> there anything that they are doing more as a community that we lack? which in-turn leading
> developers to choose Debian/Ubuntu as their default working environment? While we are
> looking at coming up with goals for Fedora, it might be a good revisit to focus on getting
> the developers back on Fedora as their default developing environment. Just a thought.
> >
> > This is already the primary stated goal of the Fedora Workstation. In Fedora 21, we
> made a big push in this direction with the DevAssistant project, which we have been
> advertising and getting excellent press coverage.
> >
> > There are plenty of other developer-oriented features in the works, including
> Software Collections (to address forward and backward compatibility) as well as
> exploration of the use of containerized applications to simplify the differences between
> development and deployment environments.
> >
> > So from the outreach perspective, I think the best thing we can do is help gather
> requirements for these new features and assist Marketing with advertising the ones we have
> already delivered (like DevAssistant).
> >
> >
> >> Regards,
> >> Sudhir
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> outreach mailing list
> >> outreach(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
> >> https://lists.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/outreach
> > _______________________________________________
> > outreach mailing list
> > outreach(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
> > https://lists.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/outreach
>  _______________________________________________
>  outreach mailing list
>  outreach(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>  https://lists.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/outreach