Response to "Getting Fedora Out of the If-Then Loop"

[Josh Boyer]

On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 11:52:32AM -0500, Seth Vidal wrote:
>
>
>On Fri, 19 Feb 2010, Josh Boyer wrote:
>>> Feel free to work on whatever you want but dont expect anything.
>>> People come by, start to like Fedora (for whatever reasons), stay,
>>> start to contribute (not speaking of GNOME/Desktop/Default
>>> contributors) and get treated like disabled persons from time to time.
>>
>> They get treated like disabled persons?  I'm not exactly sure what you
>> mean, but that sounds pretty offensive to multiple groups of people.
>>
>
>Actually - I think it sounds about right.

Yeah... I'm going to have to sort of disagree with you there.

>Access is made for them, but it's not planned in. It's sort of made an 
>afterthought. That sounds like most accessibility features I've seen for 
>various disabilities in the real world.

You know as well as I do that the current state of affairs in disabled
accessibility is not a goal to shoot for.

Further, I think your analogy is just wrong or at best perhaps skewed.
There are no explicit extra hurdles to jump through that only apply to one
group or the other.  If there are, that is something we should be focused
on eliminating for the most part.

In terms of contribution to Fedora, KDE, LXDE, XFCE are not afterthoughts.
They have active contributor bases that as far as I know are no impeded
by any sort of accessibility issues in terms of the Fedora project.  They
produce useful and, in my opinion, fairly high quality spins that their
user bases seem pleased with.

Now, I will certainly agree that resources across the various Spins are
not equal.  However that is not an inherent flaw in Fedora that needs
fixing.  Resources (both in terms of finance and developer hours) are
going to naturally vary depending on interest in the particular items.
Trying to skew that as some sort of "Fedora only cares about XYZ and
not ABC" just seems like pot stirring.  It could certainly be the case
that XYZ only cares about XYZ, but it's not a reflection of the Fedora
project.

And don't think I'm sitting here being some kind of status quo
sympathizer.  I know first hand what it's like to have resources either
shift away from something you care about or not be at the same level as
other things inherently.  It happend with PPC.  However, I also know
that it is something that is going to happen from time to time and
pretending that we as a project could magically make everything be equal
is going to both fail and just feed into more bad blood.  Interests and
time will fall where people have interest and time.

josh