Future of the server WG

[Jon Stanley]

I’m quite concerned about the status of the Fedora Server Working
group after the departure of Stephen - he provided excellent
leadership and is definitely missed from the working group. However,
things seem to have fallen by the wayside since his departure. Perhaps
the members that are at Flock can meet and hammer out what the future
of the working group should be. From my perspective, there are a few
things:

We need to be a viable upstream for some of our downstream
derivatives, and be a thought leader for what folks want to see there.
I know that this can be a little controversial among some people, but
we cannot ignore the fact that we are the upstream of one of the major
Linux server vendors in the world. It would be foolish of us to do so.

More than that, we need to be a fountain of innovation in the server
ecosystem - regardless of what our downstream constituents want or are
paying for. I think that RoleKit is a good example of this. It started
as something that our downstream wanted and funded. They then changed
their mind on that for reasons that I’m not privy to, but the work has
continued, albeit slower.

We need to decide what our deliverables are going to be. The cloud
working group has shifted towards a minimal OS and containers as the
solution. Is this something that we should adopt, and deliver the best
containers that there are for various server roles?

Is the deliverable something else entirely? Do we stay the course that
we have been of producing a general purpose OS with some tweaking? I’d
like to see the server product be differentiated from a “choose your
own adventure” system that anyone can build today, but be something
with some thought behind the integration of various components and
making sure that things work well together. Is there room for the
“choose your own adventure” course? Of course - some people will
choose that.

We need to go back to the initial PRD
(https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Server/Product_Requirements_Document)
that the working group was formed with and see if it’s still valid and
viable, or if we need to change it, and if so in what way? What does
that lead to in terms of deliverables?

I’m willing to help with some of this work, but I cannot lead it since
I’m busy with $DAYJOB, but I’ll help in absolutely any way that I’m
able to.