submitting ideas to Fedora

Casey Dahlin cjdahlin at ncsu.edu
Fri Feb 29 22:05:57 UTC 2008


Callum Lerwick wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-02-29 at 13:03 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
>   
>> Callum Lerwick wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> I'm a Software Engineer. I believe my time is best spent making
>>> Fedora and Open Source in general, better. A better system will sell
>>> itself.
>>>       
>> Hmmm, then why are all those boxes running windows?
>>     
>
> Is this a troll? Yeah yeah, its idealistic engineer thinking. I
> considered saying "A better product will... well, it's easier to sell."
> but that wouldn't have sounded as epic. :)
>
>   
>> A better question would be whether it is to promote what you happen to 
>> have, or to learn what users would like to have.  There are a lot of 
>> things that could be better in a distribution simply by combining 
>> features that are already available in upstream packages.  For example, 
>> fedora ships an LDAP server and has the capability of using one for user 
>> authentication, but no one does - and the value of doing it isn't 
>> obvious until you install your second box.  Why couldn't these be 
>> shipped to work together and be the default way to manage users even on 
>> a single box?
>>     
>
> Users want ponies, and there's no lack of them coming on fedora-devel to
> tell us so. My point here is I see no lack of communication between
> Fedora developers and users. There's this and other mailing lists, IRC,
> and forums such as fedoraforum.org, all of which are frequented by at
> least some developers and/or ambassadors. Ambassadors are in direct
> contact with user communities. Many developers are in direct contact
> with users. They have day jobs as IT people at universities, or research
> institutions... Red Hat of course has its customers. And developers are
> users too.
>
> I see no problem that needs to be fixed. (Yes, more engineer thinking.)
> Why give our users a hollow, meaningless vote? We'd be lying to them.
> What are we, a United States presidential election? :)
>   

I don't see anyone approaching this from a marketing perspective.

Yes, there are channels to get to developers, and yes they are used more 
or less effectively, but look at the experience: You want something 
done, so you go to fedora, and you are linked to a shiny blue website. 
It intros with a long string of "motherhood and apple pie" speak about 
collaboration and working together to make fedora better for all of us. 
Then you post your idea in a nice little template, and collect your 
thank you for making the world a better place as you log out.

Making the users feel special is a good objective too, in addition to 
listening to what they want. Also, making this sharing very public turns 
the collaboration itself into a kind of advertisement. Others who 
stumble upon the site get to say "hey, look how collaborative Fedora is. 
I should check this out."

Even if little to no new ideas are reaped from the process, it still 
makes people happy.

--CJD




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