FESCo Meeting Summary - 2009-03-06

[Jarod Wilson]

On Friday 06 March 2009 18:56:24 David Nielsen wrote:
> I tried to answer critics, I offered, and contacted upstream to ask them to
> help answer questions (to which they kindly agreed). when instead of a
> productive debate as was requested no such debate ever took place. Looking
> back at the IRC log I am left with a foul taste in my mouth,

Personally, I thought all the debate that was had was a good thing. Would
it have gone over better with you if FESCo spent only 30 seconds on the
feature and shot it down right then? Granted, yes, it would have been much
better had you been given the opportunity to be present. These things
happen, most of us are volunteers like yourself. Yes, I work for Red Hat,
but technically, my day job has nothing to do with Fedora or FESCo. But
really, you've got a bad taste in your mouth over people having concerns
and them being discussed? I mean, really, these concerns were NOT major
factors in the decision to reject the feature. In my mind, the only
consideration that played a major role in this decision was that the Fedora
desktop team wasn't on board with this feature.

> mentions of what RHEL supports

Honestly, that had little or no influence over the outcome, and regardless,
I don't see why someone mentioning the wishes of the primary benefactor of
the Fedora Project as a possible consideration is a problem.

> and how it's not a bad thing to discriminate based on language.

It is if the language the app is written in stands on legally shaky
ground, and including said app pulls in a decent-sized additional
dependency load for the live media. But this wasn't even the main
deciding factor either, just a secondary consideration, IMO.

> I did this, out of the desire to make Fedora better. The sign on my door
> says Fedora volunteer. It does so for a reason. I am frankly disgusted by
> this whole affair, especially since my honesty and motives were brought into
> question.

For the record, I'd just like to point out that at least as far as I can
recall from the meeting, nobody in FESCo questioned your honesty or motives.
What transpired in private email, I'm not privy to.

> > I think FESCo made the right decision here.
> 
> And even if they did not, we abide by it.

For F11, yes, you do. Escalate to the Fedora Board if you believe FESCo
acted inappropriately. There's nothing stopping anyone from proposing
Banshee as the default media player for F12 or later. But note that it
*is* going to require buy-in from the desktop team. If they buy in, I'm
pretty sure that's the primary thing necessary to get FESCo to approve
changing the default gnome media player to Banshee.

Look at it this way for a second: pretend there's no FESCo. Who would you
have to convince to change the default gnome media player? I'm thinking
the gnome desktop group, no?

> This is FEScos world, we just live in it.

I understand you're upset about not getting your way, and you're well within
your rights to be upset. But the above is ridiculous. FESCo is here for the
Fedora community as a whole -- the community voted FESCo into office, and
FESCo does its best to serve its constituency. There's no hidden agenda to
keep you or anyone else down. Honest. You simply can't please everyone all
the time.

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at redhat.com