Target market?

[Mike McGrath]

Bill Nottingham wrote:
> (warning: some of you have seen this rant before)
>
> Mike McGrath (mmcgrath at redhat.com) said: 
>   
>> What is our target market supposed to be?
>>     
>
> We don't have one! Seriously, I have yet to see anything that shows that
> we have a coherent market, a plan for attack, or *anything* along those
> lines.
>
>   

I'm glad I'm not alone in my thinking.  We've done a lot of great things 
with Fedora the organization recently but the actual operating system 
feels...  without direction.

> Whatever you can say about Ubuntu, they had a coherent, directed, plan,
> and they executed. We have no user-visible plan, and I think it shows.
>
>   

That they do, I regularly see "What Ubuntu has to do to take on 
Microsoft" which, in their fanboys eyes means they've already conquered 
the Linux world.   Whereas with Fedora we end up implementing a lot of 
new great technologies (virtualization immediately comes to mind) but 
who did we implement it for, and for what purpose?  (answer 
intentionally left blank)

> But does Fedora have any goals?
>   

And here lies "The Fedora Dilemma".  We have all of the pieces we need 
to be *the* great Linux distribution.  But there are some problems.

1) A truly great desktop cannot exist without support and a longer life 
cycle and maybe support.  Therefore Fedora is not a great desktop.

2) Open source values has ensured that we will not be touching the 
multimedia market (directly) any time in the next many years.

3) The fast moving pace of Fedora has ensured that our developers are 
busy doing great and interesting work and ignoring things like 
system-config-network vs NetworkManager.  This makes for a less pleasant 
experience for our users... but do we care?  If we're a desktop OS we 
do.  if we are a development platform, we do not.

(below is a little Q and A with myself)
 
So what do we do?  Our current skill set seems to lend itself to the 
Desktop / Online Desktop environment. 

Do we quietly hope people respin Fedora with multimedia bits and that 
those become popular?  Yes, though we cannot talk about them, link to 
them or acknowledge their existence in any way.  We also can't talk 
about them.  Or link to them.  Or acknowledge their existence in any 
way.  Or talk about them.

Is popularity not a value of Fedora?  I think it is, which may be at 
odds with being bleeding edge.

How do we come up with a unified strategy for Fedora?  We do it here.  
FESCo is finding its new place in the Fedora world and I personally 
think a lot of time could be spent on getting things like 
system-config-network vs NetworkManager figured out.  Meanwhile those on 
the FAB (which includes Fesco) need to duke it out until we can come up 
with something that we can put on a webpage in a few words and have 
people know why were here.

While Fedora has always been made by those doing the work, but we need 
something more than that now our landscape has change and we haven't.

    -Mike