back to the basics of fedora.next

[Michael Cronenworth]

Matthew Miller wrote:
> 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.

Perhaps Fedora has been marketed incorrectly. There's nothing wrong with running 
Fedora on anything from a Pi to a 16+ core server, but the main download for 
Fedora touts it as a Desktop distribution. Perhaps announcing there is a Server 
product will sway those users into looking at Fedora, but it could have been 
done with a change to the web site.

> 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.

Marketing and Design seem to have, indirectly, necessitated this change. Perhaps 
their goals need to be re-evaluated during this new process.

> 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 studied the discussions prior to the creation of these workgroups and I saw 
positive ideas. The problem I'm seeing now is that when those ideas are put in 
practice they don't appear to be as fruitful.

> 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?

Thanks for taking the time to reply. I feel slightly better today.