Proposal for the new Fedora Project

[Bill Nottingham]

Mike McGrath (mmcgrath at redhat.com) said: 
> > So what am I proposing?  I think Fedora should slowly transition itself to
> > be similar to how the Apache Software Foundation is setup.  We should put
> > more resources into fedorahosted and grow it.  (Perhaps our new
> > infrastructure lead would agree?  ;)  but the infrastructure is only one
> > tiny part of it.  We build these applications, get communities around them
> > then let OTHERS actually run them.  We'd need engineering coordinators,
> > architects, planners.  Not just from Red Hat but from other major
> > stakeholders as well.  We create these tools for others.
> >
> > Our best plan for Google isn't to take them on directly but to build tools
> > that let everyone take them on a little bit at a time.  Clearly this isn't
> > something that will be done next month.  This is an ambitious, long term
> > goal that would take place over the next several years.  The reason it
> > will work is we'd be getting on the HTML5 bandwagon early.  Very early.
> > Others are already doing work here.  Like Mozilla's skywriter:
> >
> > http://mozillalabs.com/skywriter/ - https://bespin.mozillalabs.com/
> >
> > Take a look at that thing.  That's the future of office/productivity
> > applications, the future of communication, the future of computing.
> > Don't just admire what skywriter does.  Imagine what it will do, what it
> > could do.  Imagine what Google's applications will look like when they're
> > converted.
> >
> > Businesses are already moving to cloud computing for their backend.  What
> > are they going to run on the front end?  At the moment?  Not free
> > software.  We're no where near that market right now..  But we can be.
> >
> > There's no reason in the world we can't spread free software via web
> > applications / cloud computing.  Even though someone chooses to run
> > windows or OSX, there's no reason they can't do their primary computing on
> > free software.  Perhaps provided by their ISP, their business, other ISPs.

I suspect going in this direction would have significant consequences on our day
to day operations.

By not focusing on an end-user/developer product, our contributor base is
likely to take a pretty large hit. Our normal progression is user ->
contributor, and if you're starting out as an app incubator, you're not
going to have any users until the apps reach a certain stage of maturity.

If we do have this drop of contributor/user base, do we still have critical
mass to proceed? Most of our infrastructure contributors, for example, came
from the same group - users of Fedora-the-OS who used it, as a desktop, as a
workstation, as a preview of upcoming enterprise technology. If we're not
producing that sort of product within our project any more, I'm not sure
we'll be able to draw from the same set of people to help out.

Of course, that discussion may be sort of moot (especially given certain
parties interest in Fedora, and how that would change if we made a full
switch in this direction). Even if you're targeting the internet-based apps of
the future, those apps can't exist in a vacuum - they'd need a) a platform to
run the server end on b) a client platform to access them. So, we could produce
both of those as well, as a secondary focus. If we want to be really serious
about that, we might even decide to split those two platforms.

Bill