Distrowatch dot com judgment of Fedora's relation with the "community"

[Herman Meester]

On Thu, 2007-05-10 at 09:36 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Ladislav Bodnar wrote:
> > I wish you guys complained earlier, when we were having a discussion
> > about each distro's description. I did ask for input, but as far as I
> > can remember, there were no complaints about that particular point.
> > Now the article has been translated to 7 languages so changing any
> > text is no longer as simple as editing one line. Also, I'd prefer if
> > any particular complaint/suggestion came directly from the user
> > community, not from people who have a redhat.com or fedoraproject.org
> > in their email addresses, since you are likely to be biased.
> > 
> > Anyway, I am now going to switch my main system to Fedora (I rotate
> > distributions every 6 months in order to be more objective about
> > covering them) so hopefully I'll get a bit more involved with the
> > Fedora community soon. Alternatively, you can try to rally your users
> > - if I receive 100 emails saying that Fedora is every bit as
> > community-oriented as Ubuntu or Debian or openSUSE, I will concede
> > that I was wrong.
> > 
> > Cheers :-)
> > 
> > Ladislav


We have to agree with Ladislav on the fact that "we" did not complain
when he posted the drafts of the new texts in the DW Weekly section.
Maybe his request to give such feedback got unnoticed. This means we
should either have read DWW better or not complain now, perhaps. ;) I
would be to blame for that too, since I do remember (vaguely) having
read this request for feedback.

My initial objective to ask people here on the list instead of Ladislav
straight was merely to ask for feedback on the question if there were
arguments against the Fedora "Cons" lines. I would then approach
Ladislav, but it got CC'ed right away; well, I guess out it the open is
even better.

I'd just say that if Ladislav would eventually be willing to change
something and be able to have all (voluntary) translators change the
line too (if things are to be changed and not just deleted, they would
have to tell him what actually to remove), that would be nice. But we
can hardly *demand* that to happen. I'm sure some Suse, Debian, Gentoo
or Mandriva folks would have a thing or two to say. :)

> If translation is the issue, I am sure we can ask our translators to 
> help out in that. Everybody is biased Ladislav. I just make mine more 
> explicit in my email address.

I agree. There are loads of fanboys out there without "Ubuntu" or
"PCLOS" in their e-mail addresses. ;) I for one am not paid and never
have (probably never will) by any "North American Software Vendor." :)

> If mass spam is what will convince you that can surely be arranged too 
> ;-).

I'm not sure if that is where we want to go. (?)
It is true this mailing list has a 'biased' objective, but let's do the
convincing thing by means of quality, not quantity.

> Welcome to Fedora again. Let us know what your impressions are when 
> you get sometime with Fedora 7.  I look forward to any reviews.
> 
> Rahul
>