Desktop Proposal

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 11:31:56AM -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Toshio Kuratomi (a.badger at gmail.com) said: 
> > Yes :-)
> > 
> > Or perhaps more informatively, in the beginning, the OS was probably the
> > sole reason for the existence of the Fedora Project.  But as time has gone
> > on we've gotten bigger and things have started to change.  The OS is what a
> > significant number of contributors want to work on.  But there's people
> > working on numerous other things under the Fedora Umbrella now too.  CSI is
> > something you're working on, mirrormanager is something mdomsch is working
> > on, fedora-classroom is something that nirik is working on, the latam
> > ambassadors are interested in working on a moodle instance....  Lot's of
> > code and content is being worked on that's only indirectly related to the
> > putting together of the OS.
> 
> Yes, but....
> 
> If Fedora-the-OS doesn't exist, how many of these do? mirrormanager may,
> or may not. (As of now, I suppose you could classify it as an upstream
> project hosted at FH that we use.) Fedora classroom? Probably wouldn't
> exist. And generally, the ambassadors would not be ambassadoring without
> the OS.
> 
I think that's somewhat tangential to what I'm getting at.  Fedora the OS is
a unifying force to the Fedora Project in that it brings us all together
but you could substitute a different unifying force instead of Fedora the
OS.

There are tons of *nux distributions on the market but they don't all have
the organized, non-OS focused contributors that we do.  If we were building
OpenSuSE or Ubuntu or OpenSolaris we'd be different than the current
projects that are making those distributions.  At the project level, the
technology that we are creating is less important than the people we have
creating it.

So back to putting the fact that we build an opensource OS into the mission
statement -- Sure we do create an opensource OS... but that's nothing
special.  What sets us apart on the OS front is that we create it from the
latest software and we are serious about contributing to upstream projects.
What sets us apart on the non-OS front is that we are working on enabling
non-coders and people who could care less about Fedora the OS to make
valuable contributions to us and the open source community as a whole.

Here's another way to look at it.  Let's say that funding for Fedora the OS
went away but funding for all the rest of what Fedora does continued.  Would
we *desire* to keep the rest of Fedora going?  Would we *try* to find ways to
keep Fedora-classroom, mirrormanager, fedorahosted, etc development going
and grow he contributors to them despite the OS not being there?  For me
personally, the answer would be yes.  Those aspects of the project are
worthwhile in and of themselves.  We'd have to make changes to them if there
was no OS to centre our attention but we'd still have a worthwhile "product"
for end-users if we could adjust to that change.

-Toshio
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