Proposal: Revision of policy surrounding 3rd party and non-free software

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2014-01-21 at 21:33 -0600, inode0 wrote:

> Before ever considering
> abandoning long held guiding principles I'd like to see pretty
> compelling reasons to do so. At this point it seems a hope that by
> doing so we might recover some of our lost user base. That is a hope.
> I have the hope that by the introduction of the WGs (all of them) we
> will gain many new users over the coming years and I'd like to let
> that play out for a while before jumping off any bridges.

I'd also point out that this seems like slightly odd timing. In case
anyone missed it, the Fedora 20 release appears to have been a raging
success. It was more or less universally positively reviewed. Feedback
on fedup was great. Even the giant SELinux/RPM brown paper bag this
weekend doesn't appear to have caused too many riots.

At the same time, Ubuntu is bleeding both users and goodwill by all the
numbers and general 'feedback' that I've seen. Not that I'm crowing
about it, just as a point of comparison.

So...I'm feeling like we have this slightly surreal experience that,
just as people are starting to feel good about Fedora and we're putting
out solid products that are well received, we're implementing a whole
bunch of radical plans to 'fix the problem' that already appears to be
being fixed, the old-fashioned way, by just *building good software and
telling people about it*.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics appears to have stopped being
updated in the middle of last year, but I'd sure be interested to see
the F20 numbers.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net