F21 System Wide Change: Workstation: Disable firewall

[Christian Schaller]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Liam" <liam at fightingcrane.com>
> To: "Development discussions related to Fedora" <devel at lists.fedoraproject.org>
> Sent: Monday, April 21, 2014 10:10:13 PM
> Subject: Re: F21 System Wide Change: Workstation: Disable firewall
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Apr 21, 2014 4:32 AM, "drago01" < drago01 at gmail.com > wrote:
> > 
> > On Mon, Apr 21, 2014 at 3:49 AM, Liam < liam at fightingcrane.com > wrote:
> > > Sent from mYphone
> > > 
> > > 
> > > On Apr 20, 2014 7:02 PM, "drago01" < drago01 at gmail.com > wrote:
> > >> 
> > >> On Mon, Apr 21, 2014 at 12:39 AM, Reindl Harald < h.reindl at thelounge.net
> > >> >
> > >> wrote:
> > >> 
> > >> >> There have been other suggestions in this thread that are helpful
> > >> >> like
> > >> >> the network zones thing (but we still have too many zones) or
> > >> >> enabling
> > >> >> services should make them work i.e
> > >> >> just enable the firewall rules.
> > >> > 
> > >> > which make sense
> > >> 
> > >> Oh finally you seem to understand what this is all about (a few mails
> > >> ago this was supposed to be "strongly prohibited" ...)
> > >> Now please goolge for "Psychological Acceptability and Security" you
> > >> will find tons of scientific papers (read them) explaining about why
> > >> it is wrong to silently break stuff or ask "yes / no" question or
> > >> arguing with "this is not a blackbox the user should learn" nonsense.
> > >> 
> > >> There is difference between a software developer, a sysadmin and a
> > >> user that simply wants to share his music with his family. The latter
> > >> should not have to learn about computer security to do it,
> > >> while for the former it does not matter that much as you said because
> > >> they ought to know what to do or where to get that information from.
> > >> 
> > > The later isn't the target for Workstation, I don't believe.
> > 
> > Not the *primary* target but still one see the "Other users" section in the
> > PRD.
> > --
> That's fine, but that's not who we need to be optimizing the experience for.
> We need to be focusing on our primary target. After that others can be
> considered.
> A developer can handle this if it is presented well, but we shouldn't let
> secondary users harm, at all, the experience of the primary user. If we do,
> then this reorganization isn't working, IMHO.

I think this is a misunderstanding of who a developer might be and why they choose
a system. Those of my friends and acquaintances, who are developers and who over the 
years have decided to switch their development laptops from Linux to predominantly 
MacOS X, has not done so because they had things they wanted to do that was 
'impossible' to do with Linux or that they thought they could not figure out how to 
do with linux. Instead they moved because they got tired of spending time trying to 
make their system 'work'. This is in no way limited to dealing with the challenges 
of a firewall, but if we want to attract developers or any kind of user to our 
system we need to make it usable without needing daily google searches
to figure out how you can do something and make parts of your system work.

As a sidenote, there has been a lot of discussions on this an other Fedora lists
over the last few Months where people have loudly come out against what they see
as infringements on the Freedom part of the four F's. Having seen this thread I 
am disappointed to see that nobody has come out in defense of the Friends part 
of the four F's, because the language and tone used by some people on this thread
has been beyond pale, accusing the other participants in the thread of stupidity,
incompetence and general maliciousness. If this doesn't change maybe the time has come 
for a board ticket to change that F from Friends to Flames?

Christian