2014-12-26 23:45 GMT+02:00 Ben Cotton <bcotton@fedoraproject.org>:
This is a great post and there are a lot of points worthy of
discussion.
 
And I was certain people would dismiss it saying "someone had too much eggnog this year"...
 
Prior to Fedora 21, I'm not sure we could really claim to have a
targeted user base. The products (or whatever name we settle on, see
the council-discuss thread) are a great start to defining more
specific target audiences. They're still relatively broad, but I
expect that as they mature, we'll see that they better define what the
target is and we'll be better at understanding who is actually using
Fedora and for what.

Well, the cloud product is a bit narrow in scope, the server is broader and the workstation is too broad. Yet still there are use cases that fall somewhere in between. The council's idea about a survey sounds good, but if it ever manages to get off the ground, implementing it will face a lot of problems.
 
> Can we
> have "Freedom" and be "First" and still cater to everyone's needs?

No, and that's okay. We could get rid of either of those and still not
cater to everyone's needs. The important thing is to meet the needs
we're trying to meet. I personally consider "first" to be the most
flexible of the foundations, in the sense that we could offer the
occasional release with longer support without compromising it. I
doubt we'll get a large share of the non-savvy user base in the same
way that Ubuntu did, but we don't have to.

Actually we do have a VLTS (Very Long Term Support) release, CentOS, especially now that they've joined the family, but the connection is not immediately apparent. On the other hand, a rolling release might be better suited for the users who do not want to perform a clean install or full upgrade every six months. However we couldn't supplant Ubuntu and remain Fedora... In my view "First" is the defining characteristic of Fedora, but it wouldn't matter without the other three. A couple of years ago, I tried as an experiment to keep a Gentoo system on par with Fedora, installing almost every keyworded package as soon as it became available, but I gave up after a week; it was too much work for one person to keep track of changed dependencies, upstream patches etc.. While Gentoo is still very dear to me, there aren't enough people involved to do that kind of work and bring it all together as a whole in a six month time frame.

As far as "Freedom" goes, there is a fine balance to be kept. It would be nice to have tighter collaboration with hardware vendors, but not to the point where they dictate what and when should be shipped (nVidia and AMD come to mind). But seeing the same thread -"Black screen after upgrading to Fxx"- resurrected every six months in the forum is getting tiring.

I know I'm sort of reinventing the wheel here and probably every single point I have mentioned has been discussed before in a meeting, a particular mailing list, a wiki page, a SIG, etc., but the truth is that there is a daunting amount of bureaucracy and compartmentalization. To an outsider, or even to Fedora members belonging to a specific group it seems like we're flying on autopilot. There is also some difficulty for those who want to get involved and it's equally difficult to contribute without stepping on someone's toes. I've met people who wanted to contribute to Fedora, but chose to work on upstream projects because they had a hard time trying to grasp and fit in the organizational structure.