Response to "Getting Fedora Out of the If-Then Loop"

Christoph Wickert christoph.wickert at googlemail.com
Fri Feb 19 21:43:25 UTC 2010


Am Freitag, den 19.02.2010, 11:50 -0500 schrieb Josh Boyer:
> On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 05:25:08PM +0100, Thomas Janssen wrote:

> >Because they get pushed out by reading over and over again how
> >unwanted they are? That's exactly the impression i get.
> 
> Where are they reading that?  Could you point me to an email or
> wiki page or document from the Board, FESCo, the Spins SIG, the
> Ambassador's group, or any of our other groups that says we don't
> want developers of other environments?

There is no official document that says this, but there is at least one
board member who claimed that "spins are a detriment to Fedora". He
didn't outline why he thinks so, but the statement still stands. And it
hurts, at least for the people who work on the different spins.

If you work on something very hard and you get no support from various
groups inside Fedora, you really feel unwanted. The only motivation for
me to continue working on Xfce, LXDE or the Security spin is the
feedback I get from from the users and other developers but there is no
motivation from within the project. Instead I have to justify over and
over again. Sad but true.

> I'd really like to understand better where these kind of impressions are
> coming from.  There is a large difference between "Gnome is our current
> default offering" and "we don't want anyone in Fedora unless they use/
> contribute to Gnome".  

It's not "we don't want you" but "we wont support you", although this
has never been stated officially.

> I just do not understand how one could get that
> impression, particularly with all the communication the Board has done
> to the contrary lately.

I must have missed this because I don't recall the board showing
interest in any of the spins or their user base recently. There was a
lot of discussion about a target audience, but IMO defining a target
audience for Fedora and for the spins are two fundamentally different
things. 

The target audience for Fedora are the "working" users, people who are
active instead of just consuming. Early adopters who are interested in
the latest and greatest technology. You may know better than me because
the board has been working on this definition for quite a while now and
I can subscribe to it very well.

The target audience of the LXDE spin for example are owners of first
generation netbooks because they simply cannot install the default spin
on a 4 GB flash drive. Or people who don't want a full blown GNOME
desktop. Or... or... or... There are a lot of reasons why one would
prefer LXDE over GNOME. But they still are "working" users, otherwise
they would choose another LXDE-based distribution.

The board is our political head, so their definition of "target
audience" is of political nature. The definition of the spins target
audience is more on a technical level. Same goes for other spins. I
don't see there is a contradiction between these different definitions,
they rather fit pretty well.

The spins serve a niche that the default spin cannot serve. But they
still serve Fedora's target audience and we need them in order to open
Fedora to new users and contributors.

> josh

Regards,
Christoph



More information about the advisory-board mailing list