Advertising "open core" software

[Nelson Marques]

On Thu, 2010-04-15 at 17:20 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> On 04/15/2010 05:11 PM, Nelson Marques wrote:
> >
> > By the way, might not be the best metaphore, but what is Fedora position
> > regarding Tomboy ? why are we not highlighting Tomboy and instead going
> > Gnote way?
> >
> > Shouldn't we be prioritizing FOSS ?
> >   
> 
> Disclosure:  I am the maintainer of Gnote in Fedora. 
> 
> Not sure where there is a conflict between promoting FOSS and
> highlighting Gnote?  Gnote is default in Fedora because Fedora Live CD
> couldn't accommodate Mono apps within the space we had.  Since Gnote
> provided equivalent functionality without occupying much space,  it was
> picked as default.  We highlight what we have as default better than
> what we merely include in the repository.   Tomboy continues to be
> available and maintained by the Fedora desktop team in Fedora. 
> 
> Rahul
> 

Rahul,

Thanks for the explanation, that really provided me more accurate
information. I've readed before somewhere that Fedora went Gnote because
Tomboy had connections to Mono. It was a comparative article with
highlighted Fedora 12 vs OpenSuSE 11.2 I think. The Live CD wasn't
mentioned. 

The idea I got from the article was that Gnote was highlighted because
it was more inside the FOSS scope that Tomboy which relied on Mono. And
in fact I do +1 for Gnote. I used opensuse for quite some time, and I've
swapped from Tomboy to Gnote without any issues or problems of any kind.
To me it's transparent.

What I meant mainly is, that we have so many FOSS stuff to highlight
that we should be careful handling the manpower (free contributors).

I've been flamed countless times for defending a pacific co-existence
between proprietary and FOSS despite of all the fuss around. In my
humble opinion, it's actually users choice. But if we face Fedora as a
FOSS enabler (our main role?), shouldn't we excel in doing that?

My point is that we don't probably have the manpower to cover it, and
dropping pure FOSS projects in favor of "open core"... That only gives
reason to Jan's concerns.

If we had a pure commercial product (such as Red Hat), it would be
probably more relevant to establish a symbiotic relation between "open
core" and our so called commercial product, that would for sure bring
benefits for all the parties. I don't think advertising directly such
project would bring us any benefit. Should be mentioned off-course, but
not highlight it as we highlight other projects (for example:
NetworkManager).

Like I said before, not trying to crash someone's party.