Artwork Quality (was Re: Sound themes)

[Paul W. Frields]

On Wed, 2008-10-29 at 11:24 +0100, Max Spevack wrote:
> On Wed, 29 Oct 2008, Jonathan Roberts wrote:
> 
> >>  PRIMARY TARGET
> >>      * Free and open source software enthusiasts, developers, and
> >>        remixers.
> >>
> >> I haven't polled the entire team about it, but I can pretty much 
> >> guarantee you that this description is _not_ what we see as the 
> >> target audience for the Fedora Desktop.
> 
> Fedora is *forced* to be a lot of things to a lot of people.
> 
> Some of the things that Fedora has to be (simultaneously) are:
> 
> 1) The premiere community development platform in the OSS world.
> 
> 2) An open R&D lab for new technologies that Red Hat is interested in 
> from a RHEL server point of view (witness virtualization's path through 
> Fedora over the years)
> 
> 3) An open R&D lab for new ideas and technologies that Red Hat's desktop 
> team is interested in.
> 
> There are others too.  The point is, the very heart of Fedora -- the 
> nature of what we are, and what our sponsor company Red Hat asks that 
> Fedora be -- will sometimes generate conflict, because there are 
> multiple constituencies that must always be made happy.

For what it's worth, I've talked about this with the Desktop team's
leader in Red Hat, Jonathan Blandford, on a couple occasions since I
came on board.  There are indeed multiple masters to serve, and it's
vital that Fedora also preserve the ability for the people who work on
technologies like virtualization or SELinux to use Fedora for R&D.
Fedora owes its very strong reputation for being a cutting edge
technology leader to that flexibility.  And that's why my only
difference with the above is that Fedora enjoys the privilege of this
leadership position, rather than being forced into it.

> I firmly believe that the INFRASTRUCTURE OF PARTICIPATION that Fedora 
> builds is the lifeblood that sustains the entire project.  Without 
> continually building and nurturing a strong community, Fedora might 
> still produce a distro every six months, but that distro will be unable 
> to provide any additional value back to Red Hat than a proprietary R&D 
> model.  And if that happens, then *some* of Fedora's key goals will have 
> been failures, and almost all of the people that Red Hat pays to spend 
> 100% of their time on Fedora should be fired immediately, including me.
> 
> Now, let's look at the current situation:
> 
> We have a Desktop team that is trying to innovate towards its particular 
> vision.  I will admit that I don't know enough about what that vision is 
> as I would like to, but I am definitely eager to learn.

As am I -- there's a good opportunity to do this at FUDCon in January,
but certainly I don't want to just let things stew until then.  That
happens to be a perfect time to communicate this vision to a sizable
portion of the community that will be gathered for that event.

> Questions that I think are valid:
> 
> (1) How does the Fedora Art team's *processes* around creating the 
> default artwork for each Fedora release hinder the Desktop team's 
> ability to achieve the goals that it has for Fedora?
> 
> (2) What is the end-state of all of this that the Desktop team wants? 
> It's much easier to find common ground in the middle when both sides 
> understand what the other is actually trying to achieve.  Let's all get 
> our agendas out in the open.  Everyone has an agenda, there is nothing 
> evil or wrong with that.  So let's share them.  What does the Desktop 
> Team actually want?  Is it "complete control over everything that is 
> seen in runlevel 5?"  Is it something else?  I have no idea.  What is 
> the delta between the decision making ability and leadership ability 
> that the Desktop Team has *right now*, and what the Desktop Team thinks 
> it should be.
> 
> (3) How appropriate is it characterize opinions as belonging to the 
> Desktop Team versus individuals within that team?  Far better for the 
> Art Team to have one set of positions and the Desktop Team to have 
> another set of positions, but to know that the collective members of 
> those teams all agree with the starting points.  Then you can have one 
> conversation, as opposed to 7 or 8 individual ones.

Thus the communication of vision.  Certainly the Desktop team's vision
is what should be driving the conversations.

> (4) Does the Desktop Team feel that it has participated in the public 
> processes that the Art Team has set up?  Does the DT feel that is has 
> been shut out from the process?  Or does the DT simply not like the 
> process, and therefore doesn't want to participate in it?
> 
> (5) What needs to be done to finally end this cycle of conversations in 
> a way that everyone can live with?  We've been having the same instance 
> of this talk since Fedora 6/7 timeframe, and one way or another, it has 
> to end.  So again, what is the end state that the Desktop Team is 
> looking to realize?
> 
> ===
> 
> I submit to you all that this isn't a problem that the Fedora Marketing 
> team can solve.  This Artwork v Desktop squabble is a problem about the 
> fundamental way in which Fedora prioritizes the needs of its different 
> constituencies.
> 
> Red Hat has asked that Fedora be many things, as I said earlier.  One of 
> the things Red Hat asks is that Fedora be the best community development that t
> platform in the OSS world, and we strive for that every day.  However, 
> Red Hat has also asked that Fedora be the incubator for the Red Hat 
> Desktop Team.
> 
> If those two requests are so incompatible with each other that only one 
> of those goals can be achieved, that is a RED HAT problem and not a 
> FEDORA problem, and we should take that conversation to our managers 
> internally.

In the same way that the KDE Live spin allows the KDE SIG to do justice
to their favored platform, maybe the Desktop Live spin can do the same
thing for the Desktop team.  There are probably other questions needing
resolution, like how we provide a specific user experience on that spin,
while maintaining the general distribution's compatibility with other
technical features contributed to Fedora by other groups, for example
SELinux, virt, and so on.  That wouldn't be so different from ideas like
the Sugar spin, would it?

-- 
Paul W. Frields
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
  http://paul.frields.org/   -  -   http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
  irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug
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