fedora mission (was Re: systemd and changes)

[Matthew Miller]

On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 12:59:57PM -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > This *is* happening, and we need to tread carefully, because once you loose
> > respect and reputation, it is very, very hard to get back.
> I really think you're extrapolating too far from some very limited data
> here. You have some statistics which indicate that Fedora usage is
> declining. You are extrapolating from this to the conclusion that this
> is happening because Fedora changes too rapidly. I don't think your data
> support your conclusion; I haven't seen you cite any data in support of
> your assumption as to the *reason* Fedora usage is declining.

I'm not extrapolating that. Fedora usage is declining -- both shown in
statistics and anecdotally. (I don't know a single student using Fedora
anymore, and I hear from a lot of students using Linux.) I don't know *what*
to blame that on -- I think it's partly just the well-deserved success of
the competition.

I am saying that *because* we are in that situation, we have to be careful.
We *do* need to change rapidly, because otherwise we'll become totally
irrelivant. But we don't have the luxury of "pushing" things on the user
community and hoping they stay around while we fix it up.

-- 
Matthew Miller <mattdm at mattdm.org>
Senior Systems Architect -- Instructional & Research Computing Services
Harvard School of Engineering & Applied Sciences