FESCo meeting summary for 2009-06-26

[Matthew Garrett]

On Sat, Jun 27, 2009 at 03:27:30AM +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > It's not the project's role to lift non-default software to the same
> > level of involvement as the default software.
> 
> That's a premise I don't agree with. The "non-default" software has many
> users (see below), it is in our best interest to support it well.

How many of those users are potential Fedora users?

> > Why /should/ KDE be treated equally?
> 
> Because it has roughly the same amount of users, if not more, than GNOME at
> a global level and because even around 30% of Fedora's users are using KDE
> judging from the live CD download stats from the torrent tracker. (I know
> these statistics suffer from all sorts of inaccuracies, but that won't
> change the order of magnitude.) Not supporting KDE would mean losing ~30%
> of our current users and 50+% of potential users, and also a sizable
> portion of our contributors (me included). The better we support KDE, the
> more people in that huge pool of potential users we can attract. It is in
> the interest of Fedora as a whole, even GNOME users, to treat KDE as a
> first-class citizen.

You're presenting a false choice. Given current resources, it's not 
possible to support both Gnome and KDE to the same level. Treating both 
identically would mean reducing our involvement in Gnome, without there 
being any strong evidence that in doing so we'd increase the size of the 
Fedora user base. Crippling Gnome in order to ship two above-average 
desktops might be "fair", but Ubuntu would have a better Gnome desktop 
and Suse would have a better KDE desktop. The only way we can be 
relevant is to concentrate development on one desktop.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org