

Re: "What is the Fedora Project?"

On Thu, 22 Oct 2009, Máirín Duffy wrote:

Hi Colin!

That's why I proposed that there be two Fedoras, though.

The folks you of your concern would join through #1. Maybe it would be
at fedoraproject.org, and the desktop would be at getfedora.org or

We don't have to be a one-trick pony do we?

What follows here is only my opinion and for my perspective - so please take it with the desired quantity of salt:

As you and I talked about on irc yesterday: what if we allowed for a really serious break in those concepts?

From various things I've read and experienced it seems like the desktop
sig in fedora would love to produce a linux and freesoftware desktop that is a lot like mac osx. They seem interested in breaking track with a lot of things that fedora - especially as a server-oriented os - uses. This includes the packaging system, package management, dynamic vs static linking of libraries, bundling libraries with apps. It may include good portions of the filesystem hierarchy standard.

Now, for people who want continuity with what they are running on rhel/centos and fedora and other unixes - these kind of changes are anathema. And so we have lots of arguing and gnashing of teeth. No fun for ANYONE really.

Now, folks who are interested more specifically in servers DO care about the pkg mgmt system, about replicable and configurable deployment, about shared libs, about the FHS and about continuity with the last 30yrs of unix computing.

I think if we keep trying to force these two things together we will end up building a sports-truck-wagon-train. Which is to say, a vehicle that is EVERYTHING for EVERYONE but no one wants to drive it.

I guess I suggest we break this off. We completely let the fedora desktop team focus on deployment via usbkey/cd and live-install-to-disk and using whatever methods.

We should also continue our existing fedora 'server' goals.

Finally, we should start to foster a set of webapps offered with fedora that allows us to compete with the apps that google is offering. To me it is becoming more and more clear that the apps on the desktop don't matter b/c the users have many, many desktops of various OSes and type of interface. So we need to be sure that users have the choice of freesoftware apps available on the net as well. B/c, ultimately, the application the user is "using" is not 'firefox' the app is 'email' or 'im' or 'random-social-networking'. Those are the apps that need to be free for the future. Where the users DATA is - not necessarily the tool they use to connect to where their DATA is. This means AGPL licensed apps and systems integrated and ready to deploy them.

In my best of all possible worlds - we have a desktop which is works with most systems out of the box and doesn't have an enormous number of applications on it. It just lets the user get to their apps elsewhere, securely.

okay, - flames on.

