Draft Product Description for Fedora Workstation

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2013-11-06 at 19:10 +0100, Michael scherer wrote:

> > > So if that's the problem, then the solution is to demonstrate the value
> > > of packaging and rpm rather than restricting all others alternatives. 
> > 
> > So to me this is the nub of the debate, and it's both fantastically
> > interesting and fantastically difficult to work out in advance.
> > 
> > In an ideal world things would work the way Michael describes, and also,
> > the stock market would behave precisely as neat theories based on
> > rational actors predict, and no-one would have any difficulty solving
> > the three door problem, and healthcare.gov would never have been
> > launched in a state in which it could not possibly work...
> > 
> > And in the real world, well, it's the real world. :)
> 
> Excuse me to remove your bnice piece of anticipation, 
> and excuse me to not answer in the same way as I do not have a good idea for now.
> 
> While what you show is likely true, there is just 1 single problem, this is not the
> future. This is the present.

Various people replied along these lines ("you can't be sure it'll
happen that way, and anyway, it's already the case that lots of parties
don't bother with distro packaging"). I'd agree with both of those
points. To summarize my response to that general line of reasoning: I
don't disagree. As the first two lines of my reply said:

"So to me this is the nub of the debate, and it's both fantastically
interesting and fantastically difficult to work out in advance."

It's not a clear calculation _at all_, and it's a pure counterfactual,
so more or less impossible to determine with any certainty. An equally
possible result is that fewer parties _relatively speaking_ have a
strong interest in aiding distro packaging but more parties _absolutely
speaking_ become interested in making software available for Linux at
all, and the upshot of that is that we get more software available both
through the 'third party' mechanism _and_ through distro packaging, and
all is sweetness and rainbows. That's certainly a plausible outcome. I'm
not suggesting I or anyone can be certain exactly what would happen, jus
that this is a sensitive and risk-prone area.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net