"What is the Fedora Project?"

[Peter Robinson]

On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 6:30 PM, Tom "spot" Callaway <tcallawa at redhat.com> wrote:
> On 10/08/2009 01:07 PM, Seth Vidal wrote:
>> We've been over this OVER AND OVER AND OVER again, Tom. When we had the
>> FAD in RDU back in the summer you even conceded the point
>> that you cannot develop for EVERYONE all at once. I believe it was
>> Notting's point.
>
> *sigh* Let me try to be succinct.
>
> * Simply because Fedora may not have a spin that is currently a good fit
> for some users does not mean that we will never have a spin that is a
> good fit for them. By making blanket declarations such as "Fedora is for
> experienced users", we prevent growth and we turn away users.
>
> I am not opposed to letting the SIGs that are responsible for the Fedora
> Spins decide who their target users are. I am opposed to the Fedora
> Board excluding any possibility of a Spin targeting a large subset of
> users, be it new users, Spanish speaking users, blind users, or women.

I agree with this wholeheartedly. Fedora is dynamic and that's why it
works so well. That's why I can install it on a 128 processor NUMA box
with a TB of RAM at work and use it on my NetBook with Moblin, my XO
with Sugar and my NAS box. The core Fedora is like a piece of clay
that allows people to mould it any way they would like.

In the process of helping get all the OLPC changes upstream and
working towards Moblin I've found that my interests in small and slim
OS installs stripped of a lot stuff is actually very similar to the
goals of some of the server stuff for things like JeOS that the Virt
and appliance teams are interested in. That's what I love about
Fedora..... its there to make of it what ever you want to make of it.
I want to see Fedora running on everything from Phones to super
computing clusters!

If we're losing users we have to ask why? Or work out why. I'm often
wondered why Dell uses Ubuntu on their desktops/laptops over Ubuntu.
Is it because we don't ship proprietary drivers? Is it because we
don't ship mp3 codecs. I personally think we're mostly a better fit
because with things like NetworkManager we've had support for things
like plug and play 3G modems alot longer.

Peter