"What is the Fedora Project?"

Seth Vidal skvidal at fedoraproject.org
Thu Oct 22 14:48:54 UTC 2009



On Thu, 22 Oct 2009, Máirín Duffy wrote:

> Hi Colin!
>
>
> That's why I proposed that there be two Fedoras, though.
>
> The folks you of your concern would join through #1. Maybe it would be
> at fedoraproject.org, and the desktop would be at getfedora.org or
> fedoradesktop.org.
>
> We don't have to be a one-trick pony do we?


What follows here is only my opinion and for my perspective - so please 
take it with the desired quantity of salt:

As you and I talked about on irc yesterday: what if we allowed for a 
really serious break in those concepts?

>From various things I've read and experienced it seems like the desktop 
sig in fedora would love to produce a linux and freesoftware desktop that 
is a lot like mac osx. They seem interested in breaking track with a lot 
of things that fedora - especially as a server-oriented os - uses. This 
includes the packaging system, package management, dynamic vs static 
linking of libraries, bundling libraries with apps. It may include good 
portions of the filesystem hierarchy standard.

Now, for people who want continuity with what they are running on 
rhel/centos and fedora and other unixes - these kind of changes are 
anathema. And so we have lots of arguing and gnashing of teeth. No fun for 
ANYONE really.

Now, folks who are interested more specifically in servers DO care about 
the pkg mgmt system, about replicable and configurable deployment, about 
shared libs, about the FHS and about continuity with the last 30yrs of 
unix computing.

I think if we keep trying to force these two things together we will end 
up building a sports-truck-wagon-train. Which is to say, a vehicle that is 
EVERYTHING for EVERYONE but no one wants to drive it.

I guess I suggest we break this off. We completely let the fedora desktop 
team focus on deployment via usbkey/cd and live-install-to-disk and using 
whatever methods.

We should also continue our existing fedora 'server' goals.

Finally, we should start to foster a set of webapps offered with fedora 
that allows us to compete with the apps that google is offering. To me it 
is becoming more and more clear that the apps on the desktop don't matter 
b/c the users have many, many desktops of various OSes and type of 
interface. So we need to be sure that users have the choice of 
freesoftware apps available on the net as well. B/c, ultimately, the 
application the user is "using" is not 'firefox' the app is 'email' or 
'im' or 'random-social-networking'. Those are the apps that need to be 
free for the future. Where the users DATA is - not necessarily the tool 
they use to connect to where their DATA is.  This means AGPL licensed apps 
and systems integrated and ready to deploy them.


In my best of all possible worlds - we have a desktop which is works with 
most systems out of the box and doesn't have an enormous number of 
applications on it. It just lets the user get to their apps elsewhere, 
securely.

okay, - flames on.

-sv





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