RFC: Proposal for a more agile "Fedora.next" (draft of my Flock talk)

[Chris Murphy]

On Jul 22, 2013, at 9:37 AM, Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net> wrote:

> 
> Le Lun 22 juillet 2013 15:38, Matthew Miller a écrit :
> 
>> Whenever I go to a tech meetup or talk to someone from a new startup
>> company, their developers are inevitably using a different (usually
>> proprietary) desktop OS, plus a non-Fedora distribution on their code.
> 
> So to
> get those entities to use Fedora, you need to lower management costs, so
> they don't feel any Fedora install is going to suck people time.
> 
> Management costs are:

Windows mainstream maintenance is 6 years, plus additional 5 for extended support. OS X has no explicit support period, but in effect it's 12 months software+security updates, and another 12 months security updates. Apple deprecates APIs much faster than Microsoft does as well, and their documentation isn't as timely or thorough. 

Apple's frequency of releases causes some consternation on the part of developers and support staff. But users don't seem to mind, as a large percentage jump at upgrading major releases around the y.1 update. So it may be that Fedora is too aggressive by a bit, but not overwhelmingly so.


> All the rest is pretty much habits picked up while running other OSes as
> managed desktops at work. They're not the cause those other OSes are
> chosen as managed desktop, they're the effect of not being exposed to
> Fedora conventions because it's not used at work.

Fedora can do some things differently where there's innovation. But network connectivity, getting along with other linuxes, Windows, Macs, mobile, needs to be predictable, and in a sense, conventional. It needs to just work, otherwise it's trouble.

> If you to see more Fedora deployments in startups, you do not need to
> change Fedora contents, you need to ask yourself "how would I built a
> small Linux startup environment from scratch using Fedora and minimizing
> operator/helpdesk costs, time and efforts",

I agree. But to me that's also a different product than Fedora is today. Many professional Mac users are finding OS X is a different product than it was even 3-4 releases ago. I think it's necessarily to critically evaluate a project's direction.

> Desktop selection logic is no different. It's all about "time/cost to be
> operational". If you reduce this (perceived) time/cost, you'll see
> startups adopting Fedora in droves, because startups only care about
> getting profitable/bought before VC funding dries down, and are pretty
> agnostic about everything else.

It might be true, but I also think any OS needs to have the applications users need to do the things they do. Users benefit from a capable OS, but they tend to not depend on OS as much as they do particular applications.

So if the idea is to get more development on Fedora, it's reasonable that there also need to be more users. It's a circular challenge. And I think it's useful to mature this so that it's a fair playing ground for free and not free software. Curiously, on OS X I can natively run Photoshop and GIMP. On Fedora I can't run Photoshop. Likewise, while I can run a commercial RIP on Mac, Windows, Linux, the proprietary driver to talk to a measuring device integrated into the printer is OS X and Windows only. So while I'd prefer to use linux as the server platform, I'm stuck.

Chicken and egg problem - but I still wonder how to make software development even easier.


Chris Murphy