back to the basics of fedora.next

[Matthew Miller]

[Apologies for late replies to a long, wandering thread. I've been at a
confernece and am just catching up.]

On Thu, Nov 07, 2013 at 08:47:44AM -0600, Michael Cronenworth wrote:
> Where's the benefit of creating a handful of workgroups that now
> have some sort of power over the distribution? After reading all of

I wouldn't phrase it that way. The idea is to create working groups who
accept responsibility for a part of the distribution. 

> "Fedora.next" process. I agree Fedora needs to continue to evolve,
> but this process appears to shake the foundations of Fedora.
> Specifics: Different kernels per "product", app sandboxing (lib
> bundling). Will the DVD/Live ISOs currently created cease to exist
> F21+? Fragmentation of Fedora into Cloud/Workstation/Server
> "products"?

Again, I don't think I'd phrase it that way. We want to target different use
cases differently. Up until now, people who want to run Fedora on servers 
(and there are a lot of them -- I was just at Usenix LISA and spoke to many
people doing so) have been to some degree at the mercy of decisions made for
"the default offering", and the only thing stopping that has been sudden
interventions from Red Hat regarding RHEL needs when there's a perception
that things have gone "astray". That's not a good way to do it -- there
should be a Fedora Server voice in its own right.

Still, fragmentation wouldn't be a good result, which is why we have the
Base Design group -- and existing groups like Marketing and Design will
still be involved across the board.


> It strikes me as odd at the large number of @redhat accounts and
> small number of non- at redhat accounts in favor of this new process.
> Who is in charge of evolving Fedora at this point? I do value Red
> Hat involvement, but I don't want the common myth of "Fedora = Red
> Hat beta" to become a fact.

This is actually completely the opposite. If that is what Red Hat wanted,
they would simply pull funding for Fedora and have something else designed
from scratch to be more suitable to that role. Fedora needs to succeed on
its own merit.

The three proposed products come from discussion at Flock, started by
Stephen Gallagher (who is a Red Hat employee but also a Fedora community
member for years), but those are basically just some broad needs that we
saw. We're already promoting cloud to first-class-citizen in Fedora 20, and
this is really just adding server to that. Stephen can talk more about how
his thinking led him to suggsting this.

As for who is in charge -- well, the structure says the Fedora Board and the
elected members of FESCo. But this is and remains a community process. I've
basically tried to absorb everything I hear from everyone in the community
-- Red Hat and not -- and attemped to integrate it into a coherent plan, and
then pushed to advance that plan. Sometimes not everyone agrees, and that
means compromise, and there's nothing wrong with that. Sometimes we're going
to make wrong moves and have to correct, and there's also nothing wrong with
that.

It's absolutely true that I'm advocating for more flexibility in what and
who can be included in Fedora, and in how we can do that. That doesn't mean
I don't have respect for what we're doing now or how we got here. It means I
think we can do that _and more_ and still all be Fedora.


> I'm still going to keep my ears open and attempt at digesting what
> this new idea is bringing to the table, but it hasn't sit well on my
> stomach so far.

I appreciate your willingness to be open and to talk about your concerns --
that's how we get anyhere as a community. Does the above help things sit
better? 

-- 
Matthew Miller  ☁☁☁  Fedora Cloud Architect  ☁☁☁  <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>