Good riddance, ESR

[Michael Schwendt]

On Sun, 25 Feb 2007 13:10:12 -0600, Josh Boyer wrote:

> > The real question: how do we get *heard*?
> 
> Have people do interviews.  The slashdot one was great.  Maybe see if
> LWN is interested in asking some questions of what Fedora is about and
> where it's headed.  Jon you listening? :)
> 
> And while I think Max _rocks_ at spreading the good word, it might not
> hurt to have a few others do it.  Thorsten for example.

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/85619  would have been an
opportunity for that.

A late rebuttal directly from within the Fedora Project would not be worth
a bean. Some of the project objectives conflict with ESR's personal
preferences, e.g. proprietary components. It's an opinion piece. He finds
his target group. Even if proprietary multimedia formats, for example, are
easy to add, Fedora won't win any people [back] who think the proprietary
stuff ought to come built-in.

Other points of his much too brief criticism don't lose weight as long as
they remain partially true or are backed up by vocal people in their
comments on relevant news articles.

What most news websites don't and can't know, a package submission process
that starts in bugzilla is incompatible with his desire to skip any steps
which don't simply ship his entirely new packages into a dumping ground
and without peer review. After he had been told about the new submission
process that is in use since Fedora 3 and that afterwards, packages are
maintained in cvs and are built by build-servers, he has started the
submission of a first half-working package end of last year, but has not
completed the few steps to sign up as a Fedora Contributor. It's not
that some part of the submission process didn't work, it's a simple
"I don't like it that way".