Draft Product Description for Fedora Workstation

[Kevin Kofler]

Christian Schaller wrote:
> And I think that will be the crux here too. To me the main part of
> 'supporting' something here will be in handling our ABI story better, not
> about writing custom work arounds for various 3rd party software.

That still implies shipping legacy libraries and sometimes even withholding 
upgrades (kernel, X11 etc.) and is thus still an unacceptable burden to 
commit to.

> There are of course many aspects to the ABI story, but one technology I
> think will be an important part of improving this is the LinuxApps
> proposal from Lennart Poettering. He did a talk about it at GUADEC which
> you can find here:
> http://www.superlectures.com/guadec2013/sandboxed-applications-for-gnome

Ewww! As I wrote in another thread, this would be a HUGE step backwards. 

What we have now is:
* a free-of-charge repository with central QA ensuring that everything works
  together,
* a commitment of that repository to ship only Free Software and active
  auditing to ensure that,
* client tooling automatically resolving dependencies, avoiding the need to
  bundle libraries (see also
  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:No_Bundled_Libraries),
* ergo, an installation procedure of "fire up 'Apper (Software Management)',
  enter the package name or some search terms or browse the categories for
  the package, click Install, confirm, (enter root password) (*), use the
  application", as user-friendly as it can get.

What we would have in an "app" world would be:
* every upstream attempting to distribute applications themselves, forcing
  users to hunt down their websites one by one to get software,
* no control whatsoever over licensing, not even a way to check that what
  claims to be "open source" really is (our auditing has found all sorts of
  licenses with bad terms, bundled code under non-free licenses, etc.),
* giving more viability to all sorts of payware models and the proprietary
  license restrictions (no redistribution etc.) that are usually used to
  enforce payment,
* massive bundling and the resulting disk space and security issues.

We DON'T want Apple-like "apps"!

        Kevin Kofler

(*) depending on what PolicyKit permissions are set for the user – AFAIK, we
    now default to not requiring any password for admin (wheel group) users