The big What-Why-How

[Stuart Ellis]

On Thu, 2005-09-08 at 08:54 -0400, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> On 9/8/05, Alex Maier <lxmaier at gmail.com> wrote:
> > What do we want to achieve? To put it in as few words as possible, we
> > want world domination for Fedora and Open Source software. 

> Must we attempt to dominate? 

I guess that I was actually the dissenting opinion...I don't think that
I'd say dominate, either. It didn't directly come up in discussion, but
my personal take is that Fedora is currently aimed at more specialized
needs, and that actually makes us less suited to being a "mainstream"
system, if that is an aim.

> Can't we just all get along in a nice big
> open source ecosystem of different interoperable solutions?

I do think that it important to differentiate between solutions,
although I'd shy away from using terms like "competition". Most of the
Fedora software list is now the same as a number of other distributions,
so that makes explaining what is unique about Fedora is harder.

> > - Fedora v. Ubuntu: 
> 
> I would strongly discourage making direct comparative statements
> between fedora and other popular fast release schedule distros. 

I actually wrote that content in a different context, as a working
analysis to show where we differ from other well-known desktops.
Actually, partly to illustrate my personal view that modern desktop OSes
superficially offer many of the same capabilities, so we probably
*can't* promote Fedora solely on the basis of being a better desktop
than another well-made distribution, and are probably also on to a loser
if we list the ways in which Linux is like Windows without going
further.

IMO, the areas where Fedora differs significantly and interestingly from
other distributions are really admin and developer features like
anaconda, Xen and SELinux, and release philosophy.

SELinux and our release philosophy are actually probably good examples
of why Fedora isn't currently an OS for world domination - implementing
SELinux is the right thing to do, but it currently complicates running
the system.

> I don't want to see anything approaching the
> grotesque release review hatchet jobs I see floating around in the
> techpress sitting on any project controlled communication channels.

Definitely. Some Linux journalism and advocacy is pretty poor, to the
point of being counterproductive.

-- 

Stuart Ellis

stuart at elsn.org

Fedora Documentation Project: http://fedora.redhat.com/projects/docs/

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