Fedora.NEXT Products and the fate of Spins

[inode0]

On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 4:11 PM, Josh Boyer <jwboyer at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 5:01 PM, inode0 <inode0 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> So I am being pulled in both directions on this. One of the goals of
>> agility is to facilitate more things being made from Fedora (at least
>> that was a discussed goal at various times). I agree with that and
>> pushing aside the best things we have built from Fedora now
>> (understanding they have been problematic in various ways in the past)
>> seems to work against that goal.
>
> There is a difference between "things being made from Fedora" and
> "Fedora making things for people".  I'm concerned that Spins have
> transformed into the latter.  There is nothing preventing someone from
> taking Fedora and making a spin and hosting it themselves.

Fedora isn't making the spins for people. The spins are putting up
with Fedora's current requirements that this group do X and that group
do Y on top of what the spins do in order to host the spins. At least
that is my impression of how it has worked so far.

And, of course, there are things preventing people from just going off
and doing everything on their own. The new Workstation product could
make that choice too and make the Workstation product they envision
outside of Fedora.

>> I don't accept the blanket assertion that the spins have little
>> benefit. Do we actually have any idea how many people install Fedora
>> from spins?
>
> We had download statistics at one point that showed most of the spins
> were not downloaded much.  Maybe the Infra group still collects them.

Those numbers were horrible but also not very informative.
Approximately 150,000 copies of the desktop spins are distributed
directly on pressed media each year and just that dwarfs the download
numbers for the spins.

>> Irresponsible is bit loaded. I don't know that rel-eng will be
>> overburdened by running the script that builds them. I also don't know
>> that there aren't other creative arrangements that could be made to
>> facilitate the creation and distribution of spins largely or entirely
>> under the control of those creating them without pushing them entirely
>> outside of Fedora infrastructure.
>
> Growing rel-eng could help with the resource issues (similar with QA).
>  If the people doing spins want to step up and do that, then some of
> my concerns are alleviated.  At least in terms of people resources.
>
>> I guess I'd like those active in the spin community to make
>> suggestions here. I imagine spins and other new creations built on
>> Fedora to be things the project wants to promote, not push away. The
>> reality may be that we can't do what we do now in support of spins,
>> but I hope we can continue to do something that helps and encourages
>> those making them.
>
> Promote is an interesting word there too.  I think we want to
> encourage people to create things with and on Fedora.  I'm not sure
> _promoting_ those things simply because someone made this is the right
> idea with Fedora.next.  This isn't specific to Spins though.  It's
> part of a much larger branding conversation that we need to have.

I agree and while it isn't what I said I did mean promote the idea of
making stuff with Fedora. I suspect promoting that idea will involve
examples of cool things made with Fedora though so it is muddled a
bit. I completely agree about the branding conversation but I'm not
sure we are ready to make some decisions without having the branding
conversation first.

John