Il 02/06/23 01:55, Sandro ha scritto:
I'm having a bad feeling about Fedora future lately, seeing all these RH
withdrawals from the project.
That escalated quickly, yes. More worryingly: It escalated non-openly and
non-collaboratively.
I hope to be wrong. But could Fedora survive the day RH says goodbye?
Shall we start thinking about having a structure (both government and
financial) like libreoffice foundation?
We depend quite a bit on infrastructure (both technical and staff-wise) which RedHat still
provides generously to us. RH being a profit oriented company (or rather, part of an even
more profit oriented company), "generous" probably is a naive description. They
have to justify every investment, of course. Apparently, the terms for that justification
changed with new stakeholders. I don't think that Fedora has changed a lot since.
Maybe a governing structure outside of RedHat would make it easier for them to support
Fedora, "lump-sum-wise" (money, man-years), because it would lift their
requirement to justify each and every individual "item"?
BTW dropping RPMs for Flatpaks makes the whole Fedora philosophy
useless. Flatpaks just bundles what they need, free software or not
(i.e. codecs support) so upstreams have no interest in find OSS solutions.
Exactly. To me that seems to be the bigger problem, and it has been developping in that
direction for a while already:
- Fedora flatpaks never took off, both for technical reasons (it's still difficult for
packagers) and ideological ones (marketing of flatpaks vs reality); both related to the
way modules came upon us.
- Codecs/Multimedia were never easy in Fedora; using (and providing) rpmfusion is made
difficult by feature-reduced versions in Fedora, and by the fact that we cannot even
include disabled repo config for them in Fedora.
- Flathub flatpak config considered to be OK in Fedora by RH legal *because it is not
Fedora specific* (as opposed to rpmfusion).
Taking all this together, the direction is: Sell the OS (that is, support and assurances)
and let the customer be responsible for what "apps" they run on that OS (from
flathub or wherever). Fedora flatpaks do not have any place there (and solve no problem).
I doubt whether that really is what customers want from RedHat. But I'm sure that is
nothing which Fedora packagers want to be the upstream for. We'd flock elsewhere, be
it distro A for its technical orientation, distro D for its stance on freedom, or some
package upstreams to help with that flatpak, on whatsoever distro that will run on.