Fedora more successful, developer-wise, than Ubuntu

Sat Dec 22 06:23:05 UTC 2007

Well, you are right. I don't know 2 years from now how many people will be
using it. But I know that whoever will be using F8 or even F9 will be at
least 3 versions out of date or will have to reinstall thrice.

How many of the "users" would be looking forward to do that on a regular
basis unless we come with a in-place upgrade option like what Ubuntu
provides. And while I am on that subject a competition need not always mean
that you have destroy the opponent. It can always be a healthy competition
where both Fedora and Ubuntu can become better and stronger and more widely
adopted. If we don't consider Ubuntu as competition then why do we keep a
track and follow what is happening in Ubuntu world. I remember not so long
ago on the same mailing list.

If we don't want to measure the adoption and success rates, then we might as
well drop all pretense of developing an operating system for the consumption
of user community and limit it for research and educational purposes because
it all points to the same thing. Innovation has it's own place, but as I
have already said, innovation is no good if nobody is going to use it.
Mozilla (specifically Firefox) is a case of innovation driven by and towards
an end user need keeping ease of use & adoption in mind. Innovation is not
magic. It is driven by specific user demand and necessity. As we say,
"Necessity is the mother of Invention".

We cannot disregard this point and absolve of our responsibility of
providing a good and free (or extremely affordable) alternative to the user
by saying that it is as old as mother earth and nothing can be done about
it. We are empowered people who have the vision and boldness to challenge
the established and create a change.

I am just voicing my opinions of what expectations the user community will
be having from us.

-- 

Mukul Dharwadkar
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http://www.dharwadkar.org
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On Dec 21, 2007 4:28 PM, Jeff Spaleta < jspaleta at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
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>

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