Fedora.NEXT Products and the fate of Spins

[Przemek Klosowski]

On 01/29/2014 07:10 PM, Ian Malone wrote:
> On 29 January 2014 23:58, Josh Boyer <jwboyer at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>
>> I consider myself squarely in the middle of those two camps.  I think
>> they have value to people.  I think they fill a niche, however large
>> or small it might be.  I also think they can be done by the people
>> wishing to provide them without relying on Fedora resources for
>> hosting and creation (outside of leveraging existing packages and
>> repositories).
>>
>> I don't consider that "getting rid of them" at all.  On the contrary,
>> I think it lets people have more control over their spins, allows them
>> to refresh them as they see fit throughout the release, and allows
>> them to market and promote them beyond a token mention on a Fedora
>> website.
> Some care is needed, if there are things getting packaged to fill a
> role in a spin they may disappear from Fedora if the spin in question
> does.
>
On one hand, I am impressed by many spins as an excellent technology 
demonstration. On the other hand, what should existing users of a base 
Fedora do if they find an useful spin with a superior functionality? If 
its function is not integrated and easily accessible from the base 
system,  they must either dual-boot or re-install  from the spin.

Therefore I prefer that the spins ultimate goal is to include the 
functionality into generic Fedora. The same goes for  other bundling 
schemes discussed here.  It's not that I object to  them per se, but I 
do think that there's an opportunity cost involved: the person caring 
about the spin has to chose between working on integrating the spin 
functionality in generic Fedora, and developing the spin separately. I 
do recognize that the former is harder, but the opposite tack has a 
potential to fragment Fedora. Spins should be like branches in a VCS: 
let's not turn them into forks.

I think the strength of Fedora comes from it being an excellent platform 
for all kinds of FOSS software, and the associated network effect---the 
better the platform is, the faster it gets better.
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