Request: please consider clarifying the project's position on Spins

[Christoph Wickert]

Am Donnerstag, den 02.12.2010, 18:10 -0700 schrieb Stephen John Smoogen:
> 2010/12/2 "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" <johannbg at gmail.com>:
> > On 12/02/2010 12:18 AM, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> >
> > 2010/12/1 "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" <johannbg at gmail.com>:
> >
> > On 12/01/2010 10:32 PM, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> >
> > I say give all *DE all spins equal support from the community, give them
> > complete decision freedom on how they do things and how they ship them (
> > for example iso vs usb key image ) and let them decide their target
> > audience and the primary vision that the project has is to be that
> > platform of the choice with the best tools of the trades.
> >
> > Not all have been treated equal here but that can certainly can be
> > changed and what's stopping us from doing that?
> >
> > I am not sure what you are meaning? What I am reading is the following:
> >
> > A) The community should be forced to work equally on all *DE's even if
> > they don't want to.
> >
> > Hows that different from the board trying to force one single vision and one
> > set of target audience with one desktop environment upon the whole
> > community?
> 
> Because the board is not telling you that you can't work on KDE or
> LXDE or TWM. Just that the work is not going to be the default Fedora
> experience. I am not sure I can better explain or help you understand.
> At a certain point a project has to say "this is all we feel we can
> support and these are people we are going to support."

This point has never been reached. It's more like this:

      * You want hosting space for direct downloads? - Sure, go and
        fight for it. Took an endless thread of mails during one board
        member dared to call me a "tard". In the end it took one
        release.
      * You want 20 MB for your Desktop on the DVD? - We don't have it
        because we need to ship 20 MB scribus-doc package on the DVD.
      * You want a prominent place on the webside right next to the
        Desktop Spin? - No, it will only confuse our users.
      * You want to set your own target audience for your spin? - You
        cannot, we only have one target audience.
      * You have a serious problem in your spin? - It's not a blocker,
        only the Desktop spin can block a release. Policy decision!
      * You want QA? -  We don't have the manpower, bye.
      * You want a respin of your spin? - Manpower, you know...
      * You want the design team to design sleeves for your spin? - File
        a ticket and let's see what happens. (Nothing of course).
      * You have been working hard on your spin for years convinced many
        companies to change their licenses to something open, so they
        can be included in Fedora? - It's still a spin and not a
        feature, it will not be mentioned in the Release Notes.
      * You want marketing? - The only spin that gets marketing is the
        design suite that is advertised on the fedoraproject.org
        frontpage. Never mind it only has a few downloads and only
        includes applications that can easily installed on top of the
        default Desktop Live-CD.

All of these examples are ether policy decisions that are in the end
made by the board or they are lack of manpower, but FWIW the bottle
necks were always people who were paid to work on Fedora. If the board
declare the spins an important part of the project these people could
very well be told to help the spins a little. It's not about forcing
people from the community, it's not about forcing anyway but about equal
rights.

And with equal rights I don't mean that Red Hat should make their
employees spend the same amount of time they spend on the desktop, base
OS, virtualization or whatever on any of the spins. But they should at
least tell them to spend *some* time on requests that come from spin
owners. When a member of the design team can spend weeks on usability
for gnome-shell I find it hard to believe there is not a single hour
left for the sleeves we requested.

You are right Stephen, the board is not telling us that we cannot spend
time on the things we like. But I don't feel that once we spent the time
the board gives us sufficient support to make the things that are not
within our scope happen.

So basically it comes down to: How important are the spins to us? Do we
want them to be a showcase of our first foundation, to show that there
is freedom within the project and that you can reach your goals under
the umbrella of Fedora or do spins just suck as a former board member
said?

Regards,
Christoph