Advertising "open core" software

[Paul W. Frields]

On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 12:47:02PM +0200, Jan Wildeboer wrote:
> On 04/14/2010 12:19 PM, Mario Torre wrote:
> 
> > You can definitely use the core version, but may you depend of vendor
> > specific plugins to do you job, just think about WebSphere or MyEclipse
> > with support for the Matisse graphics builder in Eclipse.
> 
> The core question here stays: Should we *promote* openCore stuff in 
> Fedora Marketing material. Please stay focused.
> 
> Do we *promote* Eclipse in that sense?
> 
> > You may say that the core version is good enough, but in my opinion is
> > not. So where's the boundary? It's completely user defined.
> 
> Yep. So we should ship it but nor promote it. Good to see that these 
> companies/projects care for Fedora and we should praise them for that, 
> but we should not *promote* it. There are so many interesting real open 
> projects in Fedora that definitely deserve to be promoted.
> 
> > I know, it's a bit like comparing apples and oranges, but what I mean is
> > this: if a feature, as in software, is nice to have, and there are no
> > legal implications, that is, is fully conformant to our current rules
> > and guidelines, I don't see why we should not support it. A vendor has
> > the right to use and modify it's own software and sell it, with what you
> > may consider added values (and thus, a selling point, and more selling
> > means better chances to support the free code base).
> 
> Again - the question was on *promoting* these projects/companies. Nut 
> about support or having them in the distro.
> 
> IMHO Fedora should use its marketing power to promote Open Solutions. 
> Not comapny driven community stuff.

Originally the story behind Zarafa was that one of our volunteer
community members worked with an ISV to get appropriate packaging
together for the Zarafa code.  It's a nice illustration of Fedora as
collaborative environment, but perhaps there's less appeal on the
purely technical/code side.

The talking points process happened on this list as an open,
transparent process, so we should definitely be considering this issue
for F13 GA and future releases.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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