Reasons for hall monitoring

[Adam Williamson]

On Sun, 2010-05-09 at 22:11 +0200, Thomas Janssen wrote:
> On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 7:34 PM, Gilboa Davara <gilboad at gmail.com> wrote:
> > If we, as a -community- project, want to remain relevant, it is time to
> > decide who we are and what is our goal.
> 
> Agreed. The who we are is easy answered, we're RHs *playground*. That
> is what everyone, not completely new to Linux, knows and one problem
> why we're at 1.3% as mentioned above. Something that other distros
> don't have to suffer from. And we're gladly acting like it, e.g.
> x-server not compatible with HW vendor drivers at release time
> (believe it or not, but users were angry about it). Bleeding edge
> stuff like PA as first, ready or not for the masses.
> One of the most frequented link in #fedora was/is
> http://fedorasolved.org/Members/fenris02/pulseaudio-fixes-and-workarounds
> Just two examples.
> 
> No wonder we're at about 1.3% eh ;)

I don't agree with that, entirely. Think about it - Red Hat sells big
enterprise stuff. Mostly servers. Directly, PA and bleeding edge X stuff
isn't of huge immediate interest to RH. I mean, of course RH is going to
pay people to work on stuff it thinks will ultimately benefit it, but it
does take a rather broad and long view of this (think how long it's
taken for PA to even be in RHEL at all). But we are a _general_
'playground' (or rather sandbox), for the development of interesting and
useful bits of technology. I think you can look at Fedora almost as a
concept car; we're developing technologies that will be useful in the
consumer car of the future, but we're _not_ that car, in a practical
sense. We have all the rough edges and bits that won't be practical in
the end.

As Kevin says in his reply, I think doing stuff like the above - PA, X
devleopment - is a strength of Fedora. It's one of the things we do
well, and for which we're valuable. But it doesn't necessarily make for
the best end-user general purpose operating system for the present
moment in time; we're blazing a trail ahead.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net