[Fedora-ambassadors-list] The Grumpy Editor's Obviously Incorrect 2006 Predictions -- Jonathan Corbet/lwn.net

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

Just FYI:

http://lwn.net/Articles/165351/

[...]
The Fedora project will have to make changes to preserve developer and
user interest in 2006. Fedora is still hard to contribute to, its
decision process is relatively opaque, the promised Fedora Foundation is
missing, the short support period keeps users on an upgrade treadmill,
Fedora Legacy is not staffed at a level where it can be relied upon,
and, crucially, other free, leading-edge distributions (OpenSUSE,
Ubuntu) are increasingly competing for the same users. Fedora remains a
top-quality distribution, but it risks losing some of the user and
developer energy which makes it an important distribution.
[...]

We IMHO should discuss about this and maybe someone (e.g. not me; not
enough time) should talk to Corbet about this. Not that is wrong in
general, but I would be interested in details especially behind these
paragraph to make things better in the future:

* Fedora is still hard to contribute to,
  For Fedora Core this seems true. Could we people at least give the
feeling somehow that it's possible to contribute to Fedora Core?

* its decision process is relatively opaque,
  For Fedora Core I agree; For the other Fedora Projects: Is it really?
What do we need to make better?

* the promised Fedora Foundation is missing,
  From the outside it seems so. But that hopefully gets better (soon?)

* the short support period keeps users on an upgrade treadmill,
  Agreed. One is practically forced to update to each release because
updates stop for Core n-1 when the Test2 release of n+1 is released. I
think I know the reasons behind this decision, but it IMHO would look *a
lot better* if we would support n-1 until n+1 is released +4 weeks

* Fedora Legacy is not staffed at a level where it can be relied upon,
  I have the same feeling as a outsider (never used it)

* and, crucially, other free, leading-edge distributions (OpenSUSE,
Ubuntu) are increasingly competing for the same users.
  Agreed

Just my 2 cent.

/me wonders if we should use fedora-devel for this discussion, but
sticks to fedora-ambassadors-list at redhat.com for now

CU
thl