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

[Josh Boyer]

On Fri, Dec 3, 2010 at 5:34 AM, Christoph Wickert
<christoph.wickert at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 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.

The rest of your post is fairly accurate, however I entirely disagree
with your assertion that only people paid to work on Fedora were the
bottleneck.  I certainly was part of a number of the discussions above
and I have never been paid to work on Fedora.  Also, the design team
has several members that are not paid to work on Fedora.

Lack of manpower has nothing to do with who gets paid and everything
to do with who is willing to be part of that particular group and put
forth time and effort to solve problems, paid or not.  You cannot
place blame only at the feet of those paid simply because they are
paid.  It has to fall to the whole group.

josh