Board efforts: scope, concept, and permission?

[Adam Miller]

On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 1:04 PM, Matthew Garrett <mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 02, 2010 at 01:05:22PM -0500, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
>
>> I think that the Fedora Project's target audience needs to be people who
>> want to work on open source operating systems.  If you want to market the
>> Fedora Project, that's the audience that needs to be addressed.
>
> I don't think this works. Treating Fedora in this way effectively means
> that the Fedora project exists in order to facilitate derivatives. This
> is clearly workable (see the relationship between Debian and Ubuntu, for
> instance), but you then go on to say:
>
>> If you want to market a physical product, like the Fedora Desktop Spin, then
>> that should be a decision made below the Board level.  Making a decision
>> about the target audience of the various distributions that we have limits
>> the choices of the people who want to work on open source operating systems.
>> Making a target audience decision at the SIG level widens the choices as
>> marketing/artistic/documentation/etc people can choose which audiences they
>> want to address via which medium.
>
> And this doesn't work. Spins don't have the freedom to customise
> packages in the way that full-scale derivatives do, which means that
> they need to work directly on Fedora. And, obviously, what it's
> appropriate to do to the Fedora package set depends on who we want
> Fedora to be for.
>
<snip>

Your example doesn't work, Xubuntu is still bound to the package set
in the Ubuntu repositories in the same sense that the Xfce Spin is
bound to the package set in the Fedora repositories. The difference is
that we understand that the Xfce Spin isn't a fork and shouldn't be
presented as a completely separate project. The "silos of community"
that have spawned out of the "Lets make a ${foo}buntu for every
possible value of $foo" in my opinion has divided the Ubuntu project
from a contributor stand point.

-AdamM


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