The Forgotten "F": A Tale of Fedora's Foundations

[Stephen Gallagher]

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On 04/21/2014 06:23 PM, Przemek Klosowski wrote:
> On 04/21/2014 01:27 PM, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
>> 
>> On 04/21/2014 01:07 PM, Haïkel Guémar wrote:
>> 
>> We should think on how we could improve collaboration with 
>> third-party repos, fedmsg/copr might be part of the technical 
>> solution. How about a Fedora Partnership Program ? We could open
>> up at a certain extent our infrastructure and collaborate with
>> software editors to make sure that their products have some
>> support in Fedora.
>> 
>> 
>> I love this idea and I think we should probably start another
>> thread on it when this one starts to die down, assuming that the
>> general sense is that the community wants to improve our 
>> third-party/non-FOSS relationships.
> 
> The choices we make are determined by the possibilities we are
> presented with. While we all agree that it's neither possible nor
> desirable to prevent installation of whatever tools the end user
> wants, the Freedom absolutists would like to put up a barrier
> against non-Free software, or at least want Fedora to abstain from
> helping. I personally prefer that choice to be given to the users,
> who should be able to indicate what they want on their systems.
> 
> Now, these abstract choices take shape during software
> installation, so it seems to me that they should be entered as user
> preferences in the software installer to shape the results of
> software search. In other words, ask the user what they want to
> see, and then let them choose from the results.
> 
> We've discussed several such values-based choices:
> 
> - the license conditions (Free vs. encumbered vs. non-Free and
> commercial)
> 
> - tolerance for gritty old commandline tools vs. polished apps
> only
> 
> - choice between full functionality vs. small size and/or speed
> 
> I think they all can be seen as user preferences in the software 
> installer discovery process, making the installer central to how
> the resulting system is put together. This is consistent with how
> Droid and iOS make software 'stores' and installation a central
> point of interaction for configuring their systems.
> 

I'd like to summon Máirín Duffy into this conversation here, if she's
willing. She's done a fair amount of research into exactly how many
and what kind of questions are reasonable to ask a user in startup
before scaring them off or confusing them. If this is something we're
interested in following up with, it would be good to have the
interaction designers involved.
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