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On the Fedora Board

Now that I'm on the Fedora Project Board, you may be wondering what my plans are. The first answer is - ideally - not much! Ideally, no one posts semi-nude material on the planet, we all cooperate nicely on the mailing lists, and in general the construction of a Free Software operating system and applications basically runs itself, and I can spend most of my time working on code too. However, we aren't quite in an ideal state, so let me give you a sense of my thoughts and goals.


First, at a high level, I'd like Fedora to be more like Mozilla, which is arguably the most successful Free Software project ever. They do a lot of things extremely well, and we would do well to learn from them. I'll elaborate a bit more on this later. But I think a lot of us inside the project should ask ourselves "How does Mozilla do it"?


Second, I'll do all I can to prevent or work through intrapersonal conflicts inside the project. These have been a very serious problem for us, and we have to remember that we share the same goals. Being on the Board doesn't give me any more actual powers here at the moment, possibly just a slightly higher platform from which to say, pretty please. (I have personally been part of the problem in the past, and that's something I've been trying very hard to fix).


Third, be a part of the vision/what-is-Fedora/target audience discussions. I have a fairly strong opinion on these in general, which let me give a one sentence description here:


Fedora - A project to produce a Free Software general purpose operating system and applications through the process of rough consensus and working code.
Target Audience - Ok, this one is hard to fit in a single sentence, but I think the current proposal is a good start.


Finally, as mentioned earlier, spend most of my time on the code!

Comments

(Anonymous)

How Mozilla does it

Mozilla gets tens of millions of dollars from Google in exchange for routing searches through Google by default.

Re: How Mozilla does it

Sure, but that's a fairly cynical point of view. Money doesn't automatically solve everything (really!).

Mozilla still gets 40% of their contributions from external contributors (ref http://blog.internetnews.com/skerner/2008/11/mozilla-revenues-hit-75-millio.html ).

I'm thinking more about their focus on one single thing, with one single brand around it, the focus on the quality of that one thing, etc.

Also their development process (build sheriff, talos), etc.

(Anonymous)

Re: How Mozilla does it

Money solves A LOT of things. It also lets you direct resources which fedora and especially the board, cannot.

Re: How Mozilla does it

In 2009 I was involved as an external contributor on two events organized with Mozilla money: release party for FF 3.5 and the 5 year anniversary of FF. Money do *a lot* of things.

Forever will it dominate your destiny

For those of us that remember you from your Debian days, I see that your journey to the dark side is now complete.
Honestly, I think the Mozilla model is a bad one: they started gaining success with the launch of Firefox, which at the time was pretty much a graphic interface cloning the look and feel of Internet Explorer. It evolved then, borrowing from Opera, Safari, Chrome. Now for them all the attention if for Windows and Mac users, where is their main user base, with Linux users being like a second class citizens.

Blinded by the increased user base and money from Google in direct relation with the user base they became arrogant, acting pretty much like a corporation and forgetting the FOSS. If this continues, there is a big chance they will have their lunch stolen in a few years by WebKit powered browsers.
+1. Copying what Mozilla does will not give you their success.
If WebKit succeeds, that's *good* for Mozilla. Why? Because Mozilla is a mission as much as a single product.

I disagree they've been "forgetting FOSS"; the push for Theora, and all the substantial work done in 3.0 and since for better desktop theming and integration. Clearly Firefox and the rest of their projects are still FOSS.

But this discussion is less interesting to me than the things that I know they do right, and that we don't do now; as mentioned above, e.g. the build sheriffing and product focus.
Better integration? Their new embedding API, proudly launched 18 months ago is dead in the water. And don't forget they're planning to revert the UI integration for 4.0.

UI integration

What's your opinion of Chrome's UI integration with GNOME? My impression is that the extent to which they lack integration has not been held against them, which suggests that some leeway is possible in making a better Linux UI without disregarding platform conventions.

(Anonymous)

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