[FAmSCo] media distribution recapitulation

[Neville A. Cross]

The following is a recapitulation of the information that I have
gathered regarding the ways that the public may obtain fedora media. It
may be inaccurate, but I feel it a good starting point for further
discussions. 

There is a Distribution Program within Fedora Project.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Distribution

The aim of Distribution is to help people obtain media. The idea was to
list sources from where you can get media. The page is outdated and
needs love (an also pages linked from that).

At the time of last update, The Distribution Program sees three majors
ways for obtaining media. Downloaded, purchased or sponsored. I will not
go into explain Downloaded.

Purchased media refers to local stores (to be in person) or online
stores. The idea was to have an updated list of people offering media
for sale. The main issue is to add new vendors and erase people going
out of business (or no longer selling Fedora media). There was two list,
one for regular stores and another for online stores. The bottom line is
that it is difficult to ensure reliability on the information provided.

Sponsored media was the idea that some one is paying for the media on
behalf of the user. There is Sponsored media that was supposed to came
from online vendors that were donating some medias in relation to the
medias they have sold. The problems is that they do not have access to
the personal data of people requesting media, unless they are giving
media to people that is looking into buying media. (I think that there
is one exception where the owner of one online store is ambassador and
she also is freemedia contributor)

There is Freemedia, which is composed by volunteers around the world,
and that articulates local responses (when possible) using a track
system created by Susmit. It is the only part working withing
distribution. Has about 125 volunteers and attend about 500 request
monthly. Freemedia team request for the volunteer to send at least two
disk per month. Freemedia receives some donations that are used to send
more media.

>From that point where the Distribution pages have been frozen, there has
been ongoing debate into document other sources. One is the events,
where most likely you may get media, and the other are magazines. Both
of this sources are very dependent on time.

Susmit had an idea of making a system to report media availability, so
any contributor was able to report an event, magazine, regular store or
online store where he or she knows that there is media available. If I
am remember right this was supposed to have a  expire time, so if you
want a store to be listed you have to resubmit it, what ensures that the
info is fresh. This was not developed because the proposed solution was
not compatible with the current state of fedora infraestructure.

Other source with less popularity was to list LUG's or university
laboratories where they have copies of the media and somebody can reach
them for helping make his or her own copy.

Brazil had for some time a distribution program in its own, where they
send media to people requesting it in the forums (or mailing lists). I
am not sure how that was finnaced, but I think it came from
Fedora./RedHat in Brazil. Now it is not working as far as I know.

So that is the recap of the history as far as I know it for distribution
program.


-- 
Neville
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Yn1v
Linux User # 473217