Empowering Fedora sub-communities

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 8:44 AM, Matthew Miller <mattdm at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 01, 2014 at 11:06:06PM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
>> How about if we decouple Fedora-the-product and Fedora-the-community?
>> The obvious model here is Ubuntu, who over time have spawned several
>> products driven by independent subcommunities. These products are
>> independently managed but use common respoitories and are tied to the
>> same overall release schedule, and each has its own strong branding -
>> Kubuntu even has its own financial backing.
>
> I like the basic idea -- and _especially_ like reinforcing that the Fedora
> community (and the Fedora Project) are bigger than the Fedora distribution.
>
Also +1 to the basic idea.

Implementation -- I don't think it's the ideal for people who are
working on products which are not one of the three already approved
but if what we're saying is that we're providing the people creating
these products with hosting resources (they can use the same tools as
the main products do to build packages, the same framework to organize
their qa efforts, the same tools to build their products from the
packages, hosting to download their product, access to the mirror
network (likely we'll need to make it so mirrors can decide which
primary and secondary products they wish to mirror so if one secondary
product becomes popular (or regionally popular) a mirror can choose to
retrieve it without the products that it does not care about),
providing them with their own web space with their own subdomain,
etc... I personally think this is an acceptable middle ground.

Note that I'm not involved with working on any of these other products
so the real question is whether those contributors can also see this
as a reasonable way to implement their vision.

> And I also share your concern about the perception. Is the Ubuntu model
> drawing the line a little too strongly? If we go this route, I want the...
> secondary (is there a better word here?) products to still feel (and be!)
> supported and included rather than kicked out or downgraded.

yeah -- I think we want them to be able to develop their own brand so
I don't think that secondary is a good term for them collectively.  We
could imagine a world where one of these products was more popular and
widely recognized than one of the three Products or a world where the
end users don't recognize that there's a common element shared between
one of these products and the three products.

-Toshio