Fedora Board Strategic Working Group

[Max Spevack]

On Tue, 12 Jan 2010, Luke Macken wrote:

> have the base desktop spins like xfce, lxde, gnome, moblin, sugar, 
> kde, but you also have higher level spins built on top of those. 
> These spins, such the electronics lab, security lab, or the design 
> suite, are custom molded operating systems designed to lower the bar 
> for accomplishing a common subset of tasks, by not only providing 
> custom menus and defaults, but ideally by fostering a community of 
> contributers and users that are passionate about using Fedora to solve 
> many different types of problems.
>
> I don't see spins as being a detriment to Fedora, actually quite the 
> opposite.  I see them as helping us cultivate a variety of 
> sub-communities that help to make it easy to do incredible things with 
> Fedora.  With these these sub-communities each with their own clearly 
> defined goals, the question of our unified "Target Audience" 
> disappears, as we now have many.

Luke: you and I are basically arguing that the idea of Spins (or 
Remixes) are basically a tool (albeit an *optional* tool) that SIGs can 
use to help advance or promote their related-to-Fedora work. 
Spins/remixes give a SIG an actual deliverable that is more than just 
"packages in Fedora's repo".

Mike's basically arguing that while those points *may* be true, the 
additional overhead from a rel-eng, testing, and marketing point of view 
may not be worth the extra effort.

What I come back to as the key point is this:

People who are working on stuff appreciate having a way in which they 
can highlight their stuff.  If you, Luke Macken, want to produce an 
insane amount of material related to Fedora & security, maybe you find 
it useful to have something called the Fedora Security Spin that you can 
show off.

Chitlesh has seen doors opened to him because there was something called 
the Fedora Electronics Lab, and not just Fedora, a Linux distro that 
has a bunch of electrical engineering stuff in it.

Bottom line -- marketing *is* valuable, and if part of the spins/remixes 
idea is related to marketing, that doesn't mean it's wrong.

Maybe this is a cheating answer -- but I'm inclined to believe that the 
moment the Fedora $FOO Spin becomes more trouble than it's worth, it 
will stop being produced.

--Max