Fedora.next in 2014 -- Big Picture and Themes

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On 28 January 2014 07:42, Matthew Miller <mattdm at fedoraproject.org> wrote:

>
> * General trend in Linux towards the base distribution being "boring" and
>   not mattering. I asked several dozen different people at a gigantic
> Amazon
>   conference why everyone was using the distribution they chose instead of
>   Fedora, and the answer was almost universally "oh, I don't care; that's
>   not really an interesting question because there's nothing important at
>   that level". Now, that might not be really _true_, but it's definitely an
>   increasing perception. How can we either fight that perception, or make
>   sure that Fedora expands to also do work in the "interesting" space?
>
>
I think it is a real item but even as a perception, it is not something
that could be fought. Perceptions are like the tide and if you are lucky
you might be able to build tons of dikes and stop the tide rolling in, but
most likely you just have to wait til it goes out again in 8-16 years.

The big issues with it not being interesting anymore is that like every
other technology it has to become more and more standardized to meet the
scale of issues that people are trying to solve. Plumbing had to do this in
the 1800's and electrical wiring had to do this in the 1900's and car parts
had to do this in the 1950's [while all of these are very diversified, they
are less so than they were and you can reasonably be assured that every car
of a certain model has the same parts, etc.]

What that means is that you end up with more and more stop energy to 'fix',
'change', 'innovate' on the lower levels because it becomes harder and
harder to get those parts to work with the rest of the industry. So either
the innovation moves up the the chain, it becomes smaller and more
specialized, or it goes to do something completely new that becomes
interesting to loads of people again. [Or in 8-16 years people all of a
sudden go, hey X is a really cool thing.. and everyone goes to do that
again.]

So I expect the work we need to work on is higher up in the stack as that
is where things are interesting. The cool kids don't want to work on the
plumbing levels of a single computer (or even a cluster), they want to work
on hundreds to thousands of computers and the distribution at that part is
just like a 'kernel' to them.. so if we want to move up we need to work on
the meta-distribution and how that works.

[Of course this could just be the rantings of a cough medicine dope fiend..
]

-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/attachments/20140128/7bbfc552/attachment.html>