Proposal for the new Fedora Project

[Mike McGrath]

On Fri, 1 Oct 2010, Bill Nottingham wrote:

> Mike McGrath (mmcgrath at redhat.com) said:
> > > 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.
> > >
> >
> > I'm not a big fan of turning all of our users into contributors.  The
> > whole quality vs quantity problem.
>
> Not saying we need to convert *all* of our users into contributors; merely
> saying that our current product gives us a built-in base of relevant people
> from which to draw contributors. If we start out working on services, and don't
> yet have any deployable services for people to try, we're going to have a much
> harder time pulling in new contributors. Generally, for new projects to
> attract contributors, it needs to be at some minimum level of usefulness.
>

I guess my argument here is that if we don't do this, we won't have any
users left anyway.  It's not a hard cutover, it's a transition.  The
larger computing universe is headed that way anyway, I just think we
should lead that transition instead of fight it.

	-Mike