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

Paul W. Frields stickster at gmail.com
Fri Feb 19 21:56:25 UTC 2010


On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 10:43:25PM +0100, Christoph Wickert wrote:
> 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.

Let's not confuse someone's personal feelings with the Board as a
whole.  As Seth Vidal once wisely pointed out, "I speak for myself,
not the Board."

Having said that, I can't control people's personal feelings, but I
certainly would like to encourage them to express them in constructive
ways.  There's a time cost in writing more carefully, but saving that
time is almost never worth what it costs in misunderstandings.

> > 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.
[...snip...]

This statement confuses "where we are now" with a potential answer to
"where we want to be."  But I agree that right now, your definition is
very representative of whom we're reaching.  I'm interested in casting
a wider net than that, provided we can give people in that wider net a
good reason to get involved and become contributors.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
  http://redhat.com/   -  -  -  -   http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
          Where open source multiplies: http://opensource.com


More information about the advisory-board mailing list