Fedora more successful, developer-wise, than Ubuntu

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Dec 20, 2007 10:19 AM, Mukul Dharwadkar <mukul.dharwadkar at gmail.com> wrote:
> Well I can certainly respect that, but what good is innovation if nobody (or
> at least not enough) is going to use it.

How do you know that not enough be are going to use it? 2 years from
now, 5 years from now 10 years from now... can you see that far ahead?
 Looking at every 6 month release as the end result, is an absolutely
fantastic way to NOT see how innovations are being adopted. You have
to look much further out than that... at least 2 years.  How far would
Ubuntu have come if Debian community wasn't already there for years
and years doing the hard work of putting a distribution together?
Every release of Fedora is a step a long a path. Not an end product.
We choose to put disruptive technology into the distribution so that
long term everyone benefits because we help mature that technology in
an open dialog between users and developers.

Remind me again, with which distribution does the software for OLPC
share the closest heritage?  5 years  out from now will there be
enough OLPC users in the world to satisfy what you personally think
are "enough" users for innovative technology that is being created now
in conjunction with Fedora?

Innovation is best measured by taking into account of all the ways you
didn't expect it to be used when you were creating it. In that sense,
mozilla is a great example of an innovation generator.  By all rights,
they lost the browser war by the time Netscape opened its codebase and
created the Mozilla foundation.  They lost it, hands down. Everyone
involved with mozilla should have just packed it up and gone home, IE
ate their lunch in marketshare.  But they didn't, and because they
focused heavily on innovating open source technology we've got all
these very interesting web-centric applications that are making use of
xul technology that aren't a traditional browser... not to mention a
pretty nice traditional browser or two as well.

The real magic of innovation is not how appealing it is when you are
creating it, but how it inspires more people to do new supremely
interesting things in the future.  An analogy, this year the color
pink may be appealing for rain jackets, but the innovation of Goretex
was revolutionary when it was created for the space program. I'd
rather have Fedora focus on developing innovations has impactful as
Goretex and not worry so much about what this year's hot color will
be.

> And I did think that providing a
> viable alternative to Windows was one of the objective of Linux. I didn't
> compare Fedora with Windows because it is accepted that Microsoft has a
> monopoly on the desktop OS market. It is within the Linux community where
> the question of popularity exists.

There are NO valid comprehensive comparable metrics of linux adoption
across openly developed distributions...full stop. You can wave your
hands all you want. But the hard reality is Fedora is the ONLY
distribution that is putting any effort into producing a methodology
in counting adoption trends.

> I order to abide by our principles I feel we must make our software more
> appealing and usable than the competition, for which the immediate goal is
> Ubuntu, then MAC and then ultimately challenge the supremacy of Windows.

if you feel Ubuntu is competition, then you absolutely the wrong
mindset in place to be an effective contributor for Fedora. The Fedora
 mission is about being a conduit for upstream development. We
integrate the work of multiple upstreams has faithfully as we can, and
drive the necessary changes back into upstream projects for everyone
to make use of. If you are looking for to make Fedora more appealing
by adding a lot of downstream patches that other distributions don't
get access to via upstream, that is in direct conflict with the
mission.  We try very hard limit how we differentiate from upstream to
thematic elements that users can easily change after install.  If
there is general UI polish, then we want that to go into the upstream
projects so that everyone making use of those project components to
build a distribution benefit.

>
> I am not trying to start a flame war. After all we are all on the same side.
> I just wanted to contribute my thoughts.

You aren't starting a flame war. This is discussion is as old as the
fedora project.

-jef