Fedora's intended target audience?

Rahul sundaram at fedoraproject.org
Thu Jul 27 13:03:46 UTC 2006


Hans de Goede wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I've been following the AIGLX repository discussion from the sideline.
> And I'm a bit shocked by what I'm reading there. There seems to be
> strong support for releasing Xorg 7.1 as an update for FC-5 even though
> that will break both NVidea and Ati binary drivers. For the records all
> my computers have a radeon 9200 running OSS drivers.

Kernel updates have been breaking non-free drivers all the time. There 
are a number of other changes that broke other third party packages. I 
dont quite understand why there is no much shock on potential of Xorg 
updates breaking such proprietary drivers.

> 
> I'm a bit surprised about this, since I find this very end-user
> unfriendly. The possible dropping of these drivers was what triggered me
> to write this mail, but the question asked in this mail has be on my
> mind for a while. When replying please focus on the asked question and
> if you want to discuss the Xorg 7.1 update for FC-5, please do that in
> the AIGLX thread and not here, thank you!
> 
> I've been putting much of my spare time into Fedora, because I believe
> in opensource and want to help and because I believe Fedora is a good
> distribution. I've got friends, my wife, my parent and here parents all
> running Fedora.
> 
> I think in our effort to make the best opensource OS we're loosing sight
> of one very important aspect: the people for who we make that OS.
> 
> Lately I've heard saying that Fedora is a testbed for new RH technology
> (which IMHO is partly true and partly is what makes it great!) and that
> its a distro by developers for developers. Know I'm very much hoping
> that the statement by developers for developers isn't true, because then
> I've been spending my time working on the wrong distro, as I want to
> work on a distro targeting a larger audience then just developers.

Agreed.

> 
> So lets see what our officially state goals are, the frontpage of
> http://fedoraproject.org says:
> Fedora Core is an operating system and platform, based on Linux, that is
> always free for anyone to use, modify and distribute, now and forever.
> It is developed by a large community of people who strive to provide and
> maintain the very best in free, open source software and standards.
> 
> Then on http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Overview there is some more about
> our goals in much the same line. So Fedora is all about opensource,
> freedom and choice. Good!
> 
> But Fedora as an OS is meant to be used by people, right? I mean what
> good is it to create "the very best in free, open source software and
> standards." OS, if almost noone is using it?
> 

There is very broad range between people use and depend on proprietary 
software and "noone" and we need to work on improving that user base.


> So I'm assuming that we are making Fedora to be used by people, lets
> call these people our target audience. I've been searching the wiki for
> a definition of this target audience but I have failed to find it. So
> I'm asking it here, what is Fedora's intended target audience?

It was pointed out in the earlier discussion the current websites didnt 
provide this. Here is a draft. Feel free to clarify this further.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Objectives

Rahul





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